Dear Retailers,

We’re now in Autumn season, and we’re keeping the focus on stability, polish, and quality of life improvements to King of Retail 2 as we prepare features for our next major update.

With update 0.3.1.2, we’re putting a lot of attention toward making your stores more responsive and your employees more manageable, while continuing to streamline backend systems for smoother play overall.

Just a note that King of Retail 2 will be on sale starting today until October 21st for 20% off! I’d be deeply appreciative for people to get the word out, as we do still have a demo available to play as well!

Smarter Teams, Smoother Stores

A new Team Order menu has been added to the Staff Management portion of the Store Hud. With this, you can now assign which number of cash registers you’d like open at any given part of the day.

• You can now send employees home for the day, giving you greater control over scheduling and labor management. It’s also an excellent spot-fix if business is slow on any day. 

• Cashiers are now significantly more responsible, and will finish their Active Queue of customers before going on break.

• Cash duty interactions are greatly improved, with fewer weird overlap issues if a register closes while another worker is on the path to open one. Overall this should make cash behavior look and feel more intelligent compared to earlier 

These small additions tie directly into our ongoing goal of making the employee system more interactive. We plan to add additional tasks in the coming months, but we wanted to set realistic standards before adding new tasks, and just hoping Employees can figure it out on their own. 

QoLs and Big Ticket Fixes

We’ve also added a few significant improvements across the board:

• Day/night toggle in Build Mode (finally!) lets you visualize the store at night, rather than just building it for daytime traffic.

• Stronger distinction between items in Stock and items on Display - this should help with, at-a-glance, determining what’s in circulation for sale and what’s in storage.

• Save games are now handled individually—no more relying on user preferences files. This should make it *MUCH* easier to share save files between players. Just a note that, at this time, custom images won’t transfer between saves which may cause some visual issues. 

All in all, these changes should make daily management smoother and more predictable.

Performance, Bugs, and Beyond

As always, we’re continuing to address long-standing bugs and performance hitches. From saving and UI responsiveness to store scheduling, charts, and HQ functions—this update squashes a host of issues to make daily operations smoother.

Here’s what we’re talking in 0.3.1.2.

Major

• You can now send employees home for the day

• New team orders in the store. Tell how many cash registers should be open

Minor

•  Added day/night toggle in build mode

• Added confirmation when going to build mode

• Save games are handled individually and not through userprefs file

• The ordering button is disabled if you cant afford the order

• Employee hover arrows are now visible through walls as well

• Product overlays have separate entries for products in boxes/delivery units.

•  Added general distinction between products in storage, and being unpacked

• Product store counts are updated regularly during the day, and on leaving store.

• A Product’s local price is only active if enabled

AI

• Employees react faster to switch tasks if you take charge of the cash register

• Customers moving to a closed register will now look for a different one.

• Customers stay in the queue after the store is closed

• Cashiers now finish their queue before going to break. If only open register, they will leave as is.

• Cashiers will finish the queue at the end of the day before leaving.

• Cashiers will also look at who is approaching a register in determining if they should close it or leave it open.

• Customers will now wait 20 seconds to see if a cash register becomes available before leaving

Balancing

• Increased overall team score-based sales performance.

Bugs

• Build mode now always displays the current time and weather as Store mode.

•  AM/PM times no longer makes double lines in Hud

• HQ rooms saves their positions properly after being moved

• First time display load lag could cause multiple displays to be spawned

• Closing screen during negotiations open the proper relevant menus

• Selling inventory have proper prompts and same audio/visual feedback

•  HQ Sell Room menu doesn’t close after selling a room. This has been fixed.

• Sell/buy at 0,00 doesn’t cause weird UI issues.

• Sales confirmation prompts can be closed with ESC. Attempiting to move inventory in store mode have proper audio feedback.

•  Interaction menu will reopen if it’s still overlapping the Inventory screen when moving or selling inventory 

•  Grid moves up and down with moved inventory to other floors.

•  Doors properly remember rotations from build mode to store mode.

•  Rotating door now triggers build mode confirmation

•  Game crashing when having 2-week scheduled employees, and going to team management.

•  Selling inventory will not return double the paid price

•  Product overlay only counts products on display for value in-store:

•  Product overlay now counts storage units properly

•  Game settings did not save properly when changed

•  Window-spacing distance should now be the same in build and store mode

•  Cash registers reset sales stats each morning

•  Deleting saved games doesn't have load lag.

•  Bug in store schedule swapping even and odd weeks in dual week schedules

•  Store schedule is now scrollable

•  Selecting show only sold in product summary, actually shows sold products

•  Product sales charts no longer converts units sold to currency.

•  Customer flow chart count not converted to currency

•  Customer flow chart buttons is set to enabled by default

•  Customer flow properly shows selected time

•  Min/Max ordering should rigidly follow what is in the store

•  Fixed animation blueprint allowing for idling poses to occur more than once pr .character

•  "Type" data sets can also be removed from sales charts

•  HQ pc properly upadtes store funds when selecting store to manage

As before, we’re building the next few steps of the game Wide, not Tall, with a focus on depth and stability as we plan out the next major update.

Your feedback continues to drive that work—so please keep it coming through the Community Discord and our feedback channels. And as always, come visit me on my Twitch channel every Friday to see development-in-action and share your feedback!

As always, keep your shelves stocked and your cash drawers balanced – which should be easier now that Employees will be smarter about staffing them.

Until next time, happy sales.

– Daniel