The next big feature – freelancing and contracting! Start your own business, build your brand awareness and reputation, hire employees and organize jobs.

This is a mid-to-late game feature, as the initial capital required to start a business can be quite high. For example to start a plumbing business, you need to pay startup fees, buy a plumber’s toolkit and plumbing supplies, and also be qualified with the right education. Marketing is also expensive, and you’ll have a hard time getting any jobs without it. However once you’ve established your brand, the potential profit is great if you can manage your business properly.

When you first start a business, you will probably be doing all the jobs yourself. Employees are expensive and need to be paid every week, regardless of whether there is work available for them. As you complete jobs successfully and on time, your reputation will grow and you will get more job offers. Once you start getting too many job offers, it’s time to think about hiring workers. When your business is well established, you can hire a manager to take care of everything and let the business run itself!

Every potential employee has a diligence rating. An employee with a high diligence will complete jobs for you faster, but in general will want higher pay. This is not always true though, and it might be worthwhile to fire a low diligence worker and hire a high diligence one if they are demanding the same pay. Potential workers are taken from the pool of preset names, so if you are supporting us at The Supervisor tier or higher your name might show up in this list.

I still need to do testing and add more business types before releasing this update. There’s a large amount of new systems implemented to make it work, so it will definitely not be compatible with previous saved games. Also once the update goes live, I’ll be removing The Student supporter tier which will bring the base price for This Grand Life to $10.

Finally, I’ve set up an online poll. Please vote to give me an idea on what you want to see more!