Hello fellow magnates! Every hotel needs guests and we spent a good amount of time spicing up the system that will bring unique party loving backpackers and gambling grannies (along with their opinions) to your future resort.
Guest Moods & Tags:
We implemented the base system of guest moods which plays a huge role in determining a guests decisions, experiences and reviews. Depending on a guest’s mood they will be more likely to pick more or less expensive items at a restaurant, bar, or gift shop.
Guest tags are personality traits, moods or preferences that affect behaviour. Some examples of guest tags are gambler, fitness junky, party lover, gluttonous, and chillaholic which all affect a guests behaviour in different ways mostly by increasing a guests need for something. For example, the gambler tag will make a guest want to gamble more. Guest tags also provide the base definition of the guest type for example the tags backpacker, thrill-seeker, vacationer, or executive business. These all define the base needs of the guest. Each guest type then has a different set of spawn chances for the other types of tags, for example, a backpacker guest will be more likely to spawn the party lover tag and less likely to have the gambler tag.
Tags will also be associated with furniture, items, and food. For example, a table might be modern, wooden & luxurious. Some guests may have a tag like “loves modern” which will make them happier when they encounter an object that is modern.
Character Blendshapes:
Our new and improved characters have seen more work after identifying some issues with the animation rig and increased the level of detail on the models. The biggest improvement was adding more values to adjust the look of character models with the ability to adjust a characters gender, weight, fitness & age. All these values can be adjusted on a scale, meaning we have a very large range of combinations that are possible. Below is some examples of this in practice (These examples are without any textures, clothing or hair)
UI:
Following on from the previous month we have been implementing our improved UI. We have reduced the number of menus a player has to go through to perform actions and merged a whole bunch of menus to be more concise and reachable. These changes will make it a lot easier for players to get a hotel started and running. There is still a lot of work that needs to be done on the UI side, we want to gather more player feedback and identify more pain points people find in their gameplay going forward to continually improve the look, feel and flow.
These are still very much a work in progress but we feel they are a vast improvement on what we had before. If you have any feedback or ideas please feel free to @ us on Twitter or jump into our Discord community
Changelog v0.5
Changes:
- Total rehaul of Guests + Staff. Resulting in better behaviour and animation
- Implemented a whole new user interface with far better interactions and flow, making it easier to get a hotel started
- Added & improved ambient occlusion
- Fixed some issues with deleting walls
- Fixed settings menu
Known Issues:
- There are still sections of the UI missing tooltips
- Some elements of the UI are not active and won’t display any information/are interactable
- Unfortunately due to the new AI, saving and loading will not work on this release
- Characters can spawn with some odd skin/hair colours and with the incorrect clothing/uniform