Hello and welcome back, Dealers from all over the world!
Today we’re here to announce the release of what we call the Biggest Update Ever, and if you’re smart enough you already know from its name that this is going to be huge! We worked really hard and really long on this because the amount of new content and mechanics involved is really enormous.
Where to begin? Well, l’d say let’s start from the biggest: Encounters Pack #2 has arrived! It took quite a long time to be implemented but we really wanted to make it as balanced and entertaining as possible. We redesigned and improved the overall structure a couple of times and now we’re finally out with more than twice the number of encounters we had before! We added a completely new recurring character named Randal Tombs with a lot of new encounters related to him. I won’t say much about him, I’ll just say that Randal is your neighbor and runs a pawn shop as well, he likes challenges and bets so be prepared to play with him!
Along with Randal’s encounters we introduced some new encounters related to existing characters, improving the integration between different plots and adding some new funny ways to get rid of the local mafia. The entire structure of new encounters is designed to follow you from the very start to the end of your game but it’s quite flexible so you’ll be able to see most of encounters even if you’re currently in the middle of a game. My personal advice, though, is to begin a new game if you want to experience the new game’s mechanics at their best.
Since there are now so much new encounters available, we decided to increase the frequency of encounters during the game in order to get one encounter on an average of a week and a half, which is much more often than before! This will surely grant you a ton of variety and surprises during the entire game so be prepared to receive a lot of recurring characters in your shop and listen to their crazy stories!
There’s no new encounter without new goals, so guess what? New Achievements Pack #3 has arrived, too! We introduced some new funny achievements related to new encounters you can unlock by exploring different plots. Of course they’re secret achievements, we don’t want to spoil you anything about what you will find!
We also improved the “My Story” notebook section by making a lot of changes to what is displayed there, so now you’ll mainly find information about quests you completed or quests you’re going to complete, just to keep track of what you have done or what you have to to in order to proceed. If you are already in the middle of a game it could happen that some entries in your “My Story” section will change or disappear with this update. Do not panic: all your actions and choices are still there, we only changed a bit the way to display them!
Let’s now talk about another big improvement: we finally introduced leaderboards in the game! I personally really love this new feature since I couldn’t wait to see how good you are at playing Dealer’s Life and how much can you beat me at it! And, I must say, during Beta testing you really beat me a lot… But I won’t surrender!
We introduced a good number of different leaderboards here and this is a really interesting thing since they actually grant different types of challenges:
- Top Grossing Item: here you will find the most profitable items of all time. They’re not registered by their real value but by the value you achieved to sell them, so you’d better make a good deal!
- Top Grossing Dealers – first 4 weeks: this leaderboard is for players who like early game! How much can you gain in a tiny game time window of only 4 weeks? Do your best to get to the top! And if you fail do not worry: it’s only a matter of half an hour to make another try!
- Top Grossing Dealers – first 16 weeks: you like the concept of the 4 weeks leaderboard but you think the game time window is too tiny? This leaderboard is for you!
- Top Grossing Dealers: this is the ultimate and massive leaderboard of all of you, registering your progress during all your games, the only limit here is winning the game: if you choose to go on “infinite mode” after that, your score won’t be registered anymore, you’ll have to begin a new game.
Of course you won’t have to choose in which leaderboard to go, everything is done automatically according to your in-game day: for the first 4 weeks of game you’ll be registered in all 3 “Top Grossing Dealers” leaderboards, after the 4th week you’ll be registered only in two and after the 16th week you’ll see your score posted only in the last leaderboard. And you’ll always be registered in the “Top Grossing Item” leaderboard, unless of course you go on “infinite mode”.
Since we think this leaderboard thing is quite cool we decided not only to give you access to that in the main menu (in the Google Play Games menu) but also to put a direct link to leaderboards in the notebook at the end of every week, so you can see your weekly progress without leaving the game!
Do you notice something new from the image above? You got it! We now let you Cloud Save in the same section of the notebook so you will be able to upload your game to the Cloud more easily! Having a Cloud Save is really useful: you can keep it as a backup if something goes wrong with the game, you can use it to export your game to other devices or you can even use it to transfer your game from Lite version to Premium version of DL! So what are you waiting for? Cloud Save now!
Do you think we’re done with this update? Wrong! We just can’t stop improving the game and since DL is cool because is funny, here it comes the most awaited Newspaper Article Pack #1! What is it? Well, it’s a big pack of 30+ articles that will randomly appear in the newspaper at the beginning of every day, they have no practical use but they’re quite fun to read and we have to admit we love to write them. They’re full of references about video games, movies and real life and we really hope they’ll make you laugh!
Talking about this, we would like to thank everyone who joined our Crazy News Contest submitting a real lot of proposals for new articles to put on the newspaper! We laughed for days! Most of your entries were pure masterpieces but we had to choose a limited number so we selected the best 4 articles and declared the 4 winners who got a free copy of Dealer’s Life Premium! Again, thank you very much to all of you, we really hope to repeat this experience in the future so keep your crazy ideas safe for the next trial!
Of course all these new features come along with an infinite list of small changes, bug fixes and improvements we made in terms of game balance, game flow and overall visual feeling. I’ll mention here only the biggest: we increased the average number of customers especially in early game, restyled icons in main menu, improved animations for the beginning and the end of the day, and much, much more!
We have to say that with this update we’re really moving forward and taking huge steps towards the big milestone that is the 1.00 version! That’s it: we’re very soon going to get out of early access and finally reach the first final version of Dealer’s Life! This does not mean we won’t continue improving the game after that, but it means that we implemented all core features and mechanics we imagined for this game and we can consider DL out of open Beta! This is the biggest milestone achievable for us and we really are so much excited about it!
What are we working on, you ask? Well, for sure there will be the new Item Pack #5 (with sports related items!) and the French localization, then there will be some new shady employees in town. We don’t want to spoil too much but everything will be soon revealed on our Roadmap!
We hope you enjoyed all these great news about Dealer’s Life and we look forward to see you in game (this time for real! I’ll look for all of you in the leaderboards 😀 )!
Stay tuned for more exciting updates and keep up the good deals!