Daily Update(11/22/24)

Daily Update - Nov 22nd, 2024

After a bit more play with the game, I've become a bit more aware of the lack of customer encounter variety. So, to remedy this, I spent a good chunk of the day adding some new customers, and re-working how customers are pulled into your shop at the start of each day.

Previously, each set of customers was hard-coded in a specific order, and there were only 3 different customers, with about 8 or 9 different configurations depending on the week of the month you're in. I added a few more customers and realized that making a bunch of hard-coded encounters would be a pretty heinous amount of work, so I decided to switch to a more procedural approach.

Now, when each day is generated, customers are pulled from a pool of potential customers, depending on how late in the month the week is. Also, depending on the week, the number of potential customers per day is limited to a specific range, as follows:

• Week 1: 1-3 Customers
• Week 2: 2-4 Customers
• Week 3: 3-5 Customers
• Week 4: 3-5 Customers

In the last week, the odds are stacked a bit higher for higher customer counts within that range. The idea behind this progression is to allow the player to accumulate enough cash to pay off their increasing weekly rent, without becoming too much of a slog in the last weeks. In some testing, I initially had an encounter in the last week with 9(!!) peasants, and it was not particularly fun to have to grind though all of those. 5 Customers may even still be pushing it, but I'll give it another play to see how I feel about it now that I've done this re-work.

TL;DR: More types of customers with more unique preferences, more random each day, more consistent per-week. Woo-hoo!

All that said, here's the day's changelog:

Changelog (v0.2.4)

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• New Content: Added a new customer: the Blacksmith
  
• New Content: Added a new customer: the Alchemist
• New Content: Added a new customer: the Cleric
• New Content: Added a new customer: the Innkeeper
• Gameplay: Reworked daily customers/encounter pool system. Customers are now procedurally pulled from a pool of potential customers. The number of customers each day depends on the week. (More customers will appear each day on average as the weeks go on.) 
  
• Gameplay: Fixed Peasant Litter action having a way too high chance of being chosen each turn (due to some debugging code)
• Gameplay: Introduced randomness into the order of customers during sales days, to improve customer variety
• Bugfix: Fixed an issue with customer barter actions where if the player had no valid cards to reduce the value of, an error could occur
• Bugfix: Fixed an issue where customers being impatient would cause them to take an extra turn before letting the player take a turn
• Bugfix: Fixed a bug with "raise prices" actions where the value of the card's internal resource itself was being raised, instead of the specific card object the customer was willing to sell, causing all instances of that type of card to become more valuable each time a customer raised prices on it
• Bugfix: Fixed the Buy button not updating its active state after selling a card as expected

Changelog (v0.2.4a)

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• Bugfix: Fixed missing init data for the Baker and Potion Seller characters. These are still wildly unbalanced and are using some shopkeeper resources for now, but should now no longer crash the game when trying to use them.