This update is all about making the world of Showrunner feel more alive, with scores of other shows to compete against and shifts to the popularity of themes over time! The makeup of your audience is now more complex, split into three groups - mainstream viewers, theme aficianados and hardcore fans.

There are also a bunch of UI adjustments and quality of life improvements, with the finance screen now fully functional and listing out monthly costs, a list of studio upgrades achieved and screens to provide overviews on your show and the platforms you can work with.

Please note that due to structural changes required in the backend, saves from older builds won't be compatible with this new version. If you want to play with older saves, you'll need to opt in to the beta branch "beta - old builds" which gives you continued access to the previous build (v0.43). Right click Showrunner in Steam, then properties, then betas, then select beta - old builds from the drop down. Set this drop down to None if you want to go to the latest version!

Functionality

- Added Windowed Fullscreen option.
- Show name generation vastly expanded, now reflects show theme, with many more variations. This is used to generate other shows in the world and also offer much more varied and relevant show names when the player randomly generates a name for their new show.
- Total show viewership is no longer calculated as a single figure, instead it is the combined total of three different types of viewer: mainstream viewers, theme afficionados and die hard fans of the show. Mainstream viewers are attracted to the show as before; a combination of show interest and average review score. A proportion of theme afficionados will watch your show based on how highly ranked it is within shows of that theme. Finally, a very high proportion of a show's die hard fans will watch every episode, but to gain them you'll need to convert mainstream and theme viewers into fans - a proportion of these viewers will become fans based on the average reviews of each episode.
- Each room in your studio now has a monthly maintenance cost attached. This increases as rooms are levelled up. The total HQ maintenance cost for all constructed rooms is automatically deducted from your finances at the end of each month.

Balancing

- Starting Script Points down to 200.

UI

- Added a WORLD option to the main HUD options. Contains three new sub-screens: TRENDS, which shows the current popularity and competition for all available show themes as well as recent changes in these; PLATFORMS, which shows various stats about each of the platforms in the world that can sign contracts for the studio's shows; TOP SHOWS, which gives a list of the top 10 - 20 (number of shows depends on theme competition) shows in each available theme, sorted by show interest and updating after each new set of episodes. The top show lists will also change dynamically betweeen seasons, with some shows ending and new shows beginning, while the total number of shows for a theme will alter depending on new theme competition scores each season.
- Added an UNLOCKS sub-screen to the STUDIO section, listing all the studio unlocks across all previous studio levels. FINANCES screen moved from being a main HUD option to a sub-screen within the studio screen. CONTRACT moved from being a sub-screen within the SHOW section to the STUDIO section.
- Added an OVERVIEW sub-screen to the SHOW section, which also becomes the new default screen for that section. This shows overall details on the player's current show; show genre and stat importance for that genre, show theme and current show ranking within that theme as well as theme popularity and competition, show interest score, fan total, number of seasons and episodes. Player can also edit the show title here.
- Updates to the SHOW RECEPTION screen, with some adjustments to the layout showing the breakdown of viewer types and details on which bonus contract objectives were met or not for this episode.
- Made the logic of sub-screen buttons and selection more consistent across each screen section.
- Adjusted the format the time and date are displayed on the ingame calendar UI element and on the load and save screens to make them clearer and more consistent.
- UI flow changes to prevent player starting to a new writing, filming or editing project while an existing one is currently complete. This is to avoid issues where players could complete episodes out of order (e.g. write two episodes in a row, then start filming the second episode before the first) which could cause various issues and may have been related to some crashes.
- Finances screen functionality fully implemented (year and month views). Monthly costs sub-screen added which lists out staff wages per job type and total, HQ maintenance per room and total.
- Added glow to main HUD buttons to indicate which main screen is currently active.

Bug Fixes

- Fixed issues with the show interest change based on review scores and made it much more sensible in the backend.
- Hopeful fix for a long running crash related to contract bonus objectives that would occur when the game went to the episode reception screen (unable to add undefined to a string in oRatings step event) - readjusted calculations here to make the code more robust.
- Show platform will now correctly persist across multiple seasons if the show is extended beyond one season.