New Season

First off today marks the beginning of the next season of play. All the top 10 players in each leader board have been added to the "Hall Of Fame" and the boards have been reset. Older game saves can still be continued, but only fresh saves made after Oct / 01 / 2022 have the ability to post scores to the current season's leader boards.

This next season will run until the end of this year, and the winners will be crowned as the 2022 release champions, and be featured along our EA champion Dycart.

Thanks to some amazing help from players such as DoorFail, Brandon, and Copendub from discord, I feel the game is in a really good place issue wise. Provided there are no major issues in the 1.4 update I did not catch myself. I am very confident in the current games balance, and I believe there are no current exploits. We have had a few exploits that were found that caused issues with leader boards, but I think we have found and fixed most if not all of them. I am sure a SpiffingBrit could come along and find a way to break the game, but outside of that I believe the game is very stable and I look forward to a balanced season of competition on the leader boards.

Fixes

Variety Of Small Fixes

There have been several small fixes and changes. These include such things as balance changes, HUD changes, continuity changes, and other small tweaks and improvements. Much credit goes out to the player base on this one for reporting all these issues in discord for me to fix up. Small changes have a small impact, but when you do enough of them they add up to a massive improvement to the game. Thank you to everyone for the continued feedback and support, it means a lot to me and the game.

Worst Game Of The Year Fix

Fixed an issue that would cause the worst game of the year to be given to no one if you owned every AI company in the game, and did not make a poor game that year. This will now use one of the large game companies as the worst game of the year if this occurs.

Milestone Fix

Fixed an issue with the 1,000,000 Fans milestone giving the incorrect message.

Language Fix

There has also been a number of grammar, spelling, and translation fixes. The translations are still far from perfect, so please continue to give feedback with translations to help improve their quality.

Engine Revenue Fix

Fixed an issue that cause engine revenue earned to be incorrectly collected. This will now show the correct engine revenue earned from AI using your commercially licensed game engine. Each engine will show there specific sales if they are the currently active commercial engine or not.

Changes

DLC Change For Self-Published Games

DLC for self-published games has had its scaling adjusted for late game to be more of an effective option. DLC is best used for digitally published games, but I wanted to ensure it is still viable for any self-published games as well. This was not an issue with small and medium sized games, but it did fall to far down for large and AAA games.

Custom Console + Digital Stores

Games made on a custom console can now be published digitally. Once packaged they can be placed on any of the 3 digital platforms. I wanted to create a player made digital store aspect for custom console games. However, it does not fit with the current progression of the game. In the distant future I hope to add a 5th office, and a new tier of milestones which will allow for some additional ideas to be added tied to meaningful progression. I didn't want to just add a huge feature without a progression tie in, so for now you can use your custom games on the existing digital platforms until the day comes that we have custom player stores.

Training Change

Training acquisitions now start at the lowest setting not 50%, you can then raise it from there.

Publishing Change

You can now offer your console when attempting to publish other company's games. If you have a custom console on the market, it will be available to suggest when negotiating about publishing. If you use your own console, there is a slight boost to the success chance.

Contract Change

When doing contracts, the contract button is now disabled. It will become enabled again when you are able to start a new contract. This will allow players to spam the contract button as they complete a contract without opening it to soon when they could not start the next contract.

Hard Mode re-balanced

Hard mode has seen several changes to better balance the experience. I sent out a survey to the hard mode players and got back some really great feedback that I used in helping to make the decisions for how to improve the experience.

The following are some major changes to the mode;

- Paragon points up from 8 to 12
- Removed the ability to use IP's
- Removed the ability to buy a Paragon Reset earning more paragon points
- Tweaked the balance numbers for a variety of aspects

By removing the ability to paragon from hard mode we ensure that this leader board is not based on play time but instead on pure skill. You can attempt to run a hard mode clear as many times as you want, but you will always just have the 12 paragon points to diversify your strategy. This will make the mode all about how well you cleared the game, not how many times have you cleared the game.

The re-balance also brings more difficulty to the later stages of the game, while keeping the early game difficult but possible.

I will be listening closely to any player feedback from the hard mode players to help continue to balance the experience to be the penultimate difficulty for GDM.

Additions

New Languages

We have added 4 additional languages to the game. They include Swedish, Polish, Japanese, and Korean. These are a first-round translation done by me with google, and will have some issues. I wish I had the finances to pay for professional translations but the game has not even made enough money to pay for this service. I ask for your patience and understanding as we give time for the community to help improve the translations through feedback and reports. If you are a new player from a non-English language, and you are unsure if the translation is good enough to play the game. I encourage you to try the DEMO for free and test the translation before you decide if you want to support the game financially with a purchase.

New Hotkeys

Added the middle mouse button as an additional hotkey to pause the game. The space bar still works for this function, but now so does middle mouse. This was requested by a player who wanted an easier time playing one handed, and it sounded good to me. I may just add a way to rebind hotkeys in a future update. It was never really my intention to even add hotkeys, but it made sense with the time controls. I think a rebind section for those keys might make sense as well as not everyone uses 1/2/3/space.

New Auto Work Icon

Added a new icon attached to worker task bars that is visible when doing consecutive auto work. This makes it easy to see what workers are on auto, as well as you can click this icon to issue a stop auto work command.

New Crypto Buttons

Added new crypto buttons that allow you to sell all owned coins, and show the max number of coins you can afford to buy. You still need to click buy after showing the max, this ensures no one can miss click and blow all their money by mistake.

IP system Re-work

The current IP system has been re-worked and we have added the ability to create your own custom IP

Now when you go to the IP menu and purchase a famous IP it will just be added to your list of owned IP licenses. When you are creating a new game there is an additional button to access your IP's and select one to use for that games creation. The price of the IP's has also been drastically reduced to make them much more accessible. This was done to counteract the fact that the custom IP which will be free to use will eventually outperform the IP's you can license. So, I wanted to make them cheap enough to use early game before you have a powerful custom IP at your disposal.

After creating one or more games that have not made use of any IP, those games will be available to be turned into an IP from the IP > Custom Ip menu. You can only create one IP and this choice cannot be switched during a play through, so choose your IP wisely.

Once you select a game you wish to turn into and IP and create the IP you will see its current sales boost. The initial value for this boost is based off the game size and quality of the original game made.

Games made using your custom IP cannot have sequels or remakes made from them, only new games that also use that same IP. Every game using that IP is technically a sequel, so the sequel feature was removed for that reason. You can use your custom IP the same way you use licensed IP's by selecting it during game creation. It has also been colored differently from licensed Ip's to ensure its visibility.

Every time you release a game using that Ip you will increase the current sales boost of the IP. This increase is based off the game size and quality of the game.

The custom IP can and will eventually reach a 100% sales boost (maximum) granting you a fantastic boost with every future game created using this IP.

We may look into adding additional ways to improve or use your IP in the future, but for now it is just there to give you your own custom IP with a fantastic sales boost.

What's Next

As per usual I will be setting my own new scores in the current season's boards while engaging with the community for feedback on the 1.4 update. I work hard to ensure each update is as close to bug free as I can make it, but things happen. I will be ready to hot fix any issues that players may discover.

Beyond any soon to follow hot fixes the next update will come in the middle of October featuring a HALLOWEEN event in game.