To all Great Dealers out there: the time has come for a new era for Dealer’s Life!
We just released the 0.80 version and with it we make another huge step towards the game as we imagined it in the very beginning, with all core mechanics into place. Still more work has to be done in order to implement other contents we designed, but in this historic moment we can officially say that all major mechanics are now implemented and working fine!
As you can imagine from its name (yes, from now on we will name every update! 😀 ), the Mighty and Unforgettable Update (MUU from now on) includes a real ton of changes and awesome new features that will radically change the feeling of the game as a whole. Since this is a really huge thing, we worked hard to test as deeply as possible the new mechanics we’re introducing: three weeks ago we let our proud and glorious Beta testers the possibility to play with the first version of the MUU and they gave us their invaluable feedback about it. Thanks to their brave sacrifice we were able to understand what to tweak and what to add to make the game that it is now. I would like to ask for a minute of silence in memory of all the games that met an unexpected end during Beta tests, to give them the respect they deserve and thank our Beta testers from the bottom of our hearts.
*one minute of silence*
Now, let’s start with details about the great MUU!
Where to begin? Ok, I’ll start form the most obvious: recurring characters are here!
We all waited so long for them and now finally they’ll start visiting your games!
But what exactly are recurring characters? Let’s say they are special characters that are not the kind of customers you’re used to see in your shop: they don’t come to buy or sell stuff, they come to speak with you and make you decide your destiny in the game. With this MUU we’re introducing the first 5 characters: the Policeman, the Special Agent, the Mafia Guy, the Mafia Boss (Don Vito) and the Worker (actually he is a special guest from the future recurrent characters pack #2, he has just one encounter now). Each one of them can bring you new possibilities, challenges, choices to make, rewards and prices to pay for decisions you’ve taken during the game! Possibilities are countless and you must pay real attention to what you say to these people since they could be quite unpredictable and potentially lethal. That’s right: in some cases you could lose the game if you make the wrong move! And that’s what a lot of Beta tester did before some balance changes, here’s why our huge thanks to them!
With many characters and many plots going forward at the same time, it could be quite difficult to remember all the choices you took during the game, so to help you out we introduced a new subsection in the notebook and we called it “My Story”: you can find it in the section about your character. All major encounters, quests and decisions you take are registered in there, so you can check them at any time!
Since a big part of the fun is to discover all the plots linked to these recurring characters, I won’t spoil much about them, I’ll just say that the reputation system we introduced with version 0.75 (and a particular employee you may already have hired) are deeply connected to recurring characters… And I’ll say no more about it!
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Ok, ok, I’ll also say that with recurring characters comes a new and shiny achievements pack completely dedicated to them!
Now let’s move on and talk about Google Play Games Cloud Save! We totally understand the need of it since it is quite bad to lose your saved game if you change device or go Premium, so we did our very best to provide it as soon as possible! With the MUU release is now possible to upload your saved game to the Cloud, so you can download it on another device or after you purchased the Dealer’s Life Premium version, or even use it as a backup!
Another really big change we made with MUU impacts the game’s balance: since many of you reported a quite short play time in order to finish the game we decided to make a huge series of adjustments to provide longer games and to align some prices/cost to recent items price changes. Now many costs, from skill increase to shops and even employees, have been modified to fit better during all the game time: the general rule we applied was to have much more expensive possibilities in late game but still maintaining the right challenge in early game.
With this new balance you’ll have much more things you won’t be able to afford at the beginning, so we also tuned the generation of offers in the newspaper in order to provide mostly affordable shops or employees according to your fame level. All these changes go along with the consequent balance of some winning threshold which have been greatly increased.
Last but not least, MUU also comes with new great improvements in music and graphics: you’ll listen to new tracks from the mighty and immense Kevin MacLeod, our first and only favourite composer, and enjoy some smart UI animations that will help you keep better track of cash flow, items and employees!
Is that all? Well, not really! We also implemented a new animation for the brainwasher power, auto language detection at first launch (which right now will detect Italian, the only localization implemented apart from English), a general sound optimization, new tutorial tips in the main menu and when the first recurrent character comes, a confirmation popup before leaving the game, an in-game notification when a new version of DL is available (with an option to enable it also for Beta releases if you joined our Beta)… and I’m sure I’m missing something, there’s really too much in the MUU!!
We really hope you like all the new content and the improvements we introduced with this update! If you do, you can be sure that the show is going to get bigger and bigger!
Stay tuned and keep up the good deals!
PS: if you want to contribute to the German, Spanish or French localization of the game, please contact us as these are currently under development!