Lots to talk about! Firstly, the Steam page for This Grand Life is up and there’s a new trailer to go along with it. I’ll be launching on Steam Early Access on 23rd October and aim for a full launch in the first half of next year. If you purchased on Itch.io, you will get a Steam key.

Alpha 1.5 includes the new theme feature and Comic Book collectibles discussed in the last article, new career paths, education courses, traits, random events, balance changes and more.

When adding new content, I try to keep things varied by using existing game mechanics in different ways. Two examples are the Law and Accounting careers.

For the Law career path, you start out as a Paralegal after you get your Law degree. When you have gained enough Law Experience, you get access to two further occupations. You can become a Legal Officer, which pays more. Or you can become a Community Lawyer, which has the unique mechanic of increasing your Happiness every time you work. The next tier up is the Corporate Lawyer, which requires the player to take the Bar Exam as a prerequisite. It pays a lot more money than either the Legal Officer or Community Lawyer.

The Accountant career path is different. In this career, you can start gaining Accounting Experience as a Payroll Clerk before you even get your degree. Once you have your degree, you can then become an Accountant. After that you take the CPA Exam to become a Certified Accountant, then finally complete a Diploma in Management course to become a Comptroller. So lots of courses to complete to reach the top of this career, but it pays extremely well.

In this update we’ll also have more random events. Some examples are stepping on chewing gum and having an old friend call you, which changes your needs slightly each week.

Next we have more traits. Here’s a short list of some of the new ones:

• Deal-hunter – You’re always looking for a great bargain. All Subscriptions cost 25% less.
• Optimistic – Your Happiness recovers faster when it drops below 50%.
• Lazy – It’s hard to get out of bed. Lose 7 hours each week.
• Short Legs – Travelling between locations takes 20% more time.

I’ve also made some slight adjustments to the Happiness need. One of the aims of the Happiness need is to kill off the player if they haven’t been managing their money properly. For example, if you can’t afford food then your Hunger need goes down the zero and then your Happiness need starts decreasing. However, this could also happen if the player wasn’t paying enough attention to the needs bar (even if they had plenty of money).

I didn’t want to punish the player too much for inattention. So I’ve significantly slowed down the rate of Happiness decrease when this happens. In practice, this means you will be less likely to go into a spiral of depression and ‘moping around’ by accident. It also means if you have run out of money, your journey to insanity will take slightly longer.

Finally, last time I mentioned the Commodities/Stock Market feature was in second place in our online poll. Well now it seems to have taken the lead by a large margin!

Here’s the full list of changes for Alpha 1.5:

New Features

• Added traits Marketeer, Coupon Clipper, Deal-hunter, Lazy, Short Legs, Speed Walker, Optimistic and Pessimistic
• Added Paint Home and Business functionality
• Added Fast food coupon – Buy one get one free
• Added Jesse’s Jokes and Generous Giving subscriptions
• Added 10 new random events
• Added Law career path, Bachelor Of Law, Bar Exam and 4 related jobs
• Added Accountant career path, Bachelor Of Accounting, CPA Exam and 4 related jobs
• Added Office Clerk job
• Added Skyscraper and Collectors Store locations
• Added Comic Collectibles and Storage Box
• Added location color themes
• Added ‘Light Reader’ and ‘Hoarder’ ambitions
• Added Can Of Paint possession at Mall
• Added two music tracks
• Added border around game map
• Added Investment Manager to top of Finance career

Gameplay Changes

• Refactored events system so only one random city event per week
• Reduced rate of Happiness decrease when another need is at zero by 50%
• Moved all collectibles from Mall to Collectors Store
• Allow maximum 4 educations on character creation
• Removed Work Experience requirements from Culinary career path
• Added Bachelor Of Finance requirement to most jobs in Banking career path
• Reduced fun and job openings from Social Services Manager and Licensing Examiner jobs
• Reduced Cooking Exp requirement for Sous Chef and removed Cooking Exp requirement for Restaurant Cook
• Increased experience requirements of Security career path

Bugfixes/Improvements

• Slightly adjusted existing map dimensions
• Added commas to all currency displays
• Added tooltip when hovering over time and needs bars
• Fixed some low-quality avatars
• Now storing historical economic indicator data for each game
• Added auction caller sound effects
• Cleaned up in-game InfoNet
• Renamed ‘Ancient Rome’ collectibles to ‘Roman’
• Enabled random city-based events in scenarios
• Added player businesses to bankruptcy proceedings
• Add needs translated string to InfoNet Search
• Added jobs at each location to InfoNet search and display
• Fixed bug with time being used on nothing at start of new week sometimes
• Fixed annoying bouncing location panels when travelling between places sometimes
• Fixed crash when going bankrupt at end of week with a Business Brand window open

Alpha 1.4 is out and contains the new freelance/contractor business feature. I gave an introduction to this feature in the previous post here. Today, I’ll talk about some other changes surrounding this new feature.

The most recent transactions are now listed when you click on your main account balance. This is useful if you have multiple businesses and they start generating income/deducting expenses from your account. You can see where the money is going, whether it’s paying for wages or materials, etc.

Your own businesses can also be assigned a hotkey now, so you can quickly access it. Just click “Pin” on the business you want to hotkey, and select a number from the list. This is helpful if you want to check up on your business, accept any available jobs and assign workers to jobs. Then once you’re done, press the hotkey again to close the business window and get back to your life.

There’s a new subscription, the Businezz Biweekly which provides you with advanced tips on running a business.

Since you’re running a business, you also get tax deductions. For those that are unfamiliar with how it works, a tax deduction is a reduction in your taxable income mainly from expenses you incur from running the business. Any business expense is a tax deduction, so for example if you made $10000 from the business and spent $7000 on marketing, materials, etc then you would only be taxed on your $3000 profit. You can see your total business income and expenses on the income statement of each business.

You can also sell a business if you have had enough of being an entrepreneur. The final sale price is influenced by recent business profits, brand reputation and awareness, and a few other factors. Your business is considered a sole proprietorship, which means its profits or losses are added to your personal tax return each financial year (and you are taxed at your personal tax rate, not a business tax rate).

As mentioned last time, the base price for This Grand Life will be increasing after this weekend. So if you want it at the lower price, head over to Itch.io before Monday!

Remember you can still vote in the online poll for what you want to see next. More content is currently in the lead so I’ll be working on that for the next update.

Here’s the full list of changes for Alpha 1.4:

New Features

• Added Plumbing business and Plumber’s Toolkit possession
• Added Graphic Design business and Calibrated Monitor possession
• Added Catering business and Commercial Kitchen possession
• Added different rarities for different freelance jobs
• Added job openings taking into account owned possessions and not just worn clothing
• Added brand reputation, awareness and marketing for freelance jobs
• Added reputation hit when freelance work not completed on time
• Implemented economy effect on freelance jobs available
• Added Business button to profile dashboard
• Added auto-cancelling marketing and quitting workers if you can’t afford them
• Added existing names pool as potential employees names
• Added business startup fees
• Added Income Statements for each freelance business
• Added materials requirements for each business
• Added variation to employee wage negotiation skill
• Added hotkeys assignable for Freelance Business
• Added recent transactions to receivables/payables summary
• Added Businezz Biweekly subscription
• Added selling business functionality

Gameplay Changes

• Renamed Beer to Carton Of Beer
• Doubled happiness penalty from being fired from regular job
• Added Diploma requirement for Library Assistant and Work Experience requirement for Librarian
• Implemented business tax deductions
• Wealth calculation includes business value

Bugfixes/Improvements

• Reduced size of save files
• Implemented click to zoom for freelance jobs
• Moved Hours Spent button from profile dashboard into Statements
• Fixed Tickets To CatCon not expiring after a month
• Added Warranty to tooltip when purchasing breakable goods
• Disable hiding work button
• Reworked Tax Statement to include more income and deduction details
• Added windowed full screen to option
• Fixed Subscriptions adding money instead of taking it away
• Changed actions on business panel arrangement from alphabetical to data order
• Switching from main menu to game now instantaneous
• Clicking on Home or Job on dashboard now travels there instead of camera zooming
• Fixed crash when pressing load game button with no saved games

Alpha 1.3 of This Grand Life has been released. This version features an improved education system as discussed in the last post, and also a new scenario! Here’s a video summarising the changes:

The scenario is called “Sue Goes To University” and is about Sue Doku, a nerdy young adult about to start her Science degree at Stanford University. Speaking of which, Stanford is a new town you can play from the custom game menu. It’s similar to Tutorialville in that the town doesn’t contain all the locations that a proper city contains. The focus of the Stanford map is on the University itself.

The scenario also works as an extended tutorial for the education system. It goes through more features that you might not be aware of. There are also some special events that are only triggered when you play the scenario, like going Elf Spotting or attending CatCon.

Another change is the addition of preset goals on the custom game menu. You can click on the Preset Goals button and see a list of goals sorted by length of time taken. The shortest settings are a ‘Walk To The Bathroom’ while the longest ones are ‘Cross-Planetary Marathon’.

Of course you can still manually adjust your goals to whatever you like, although they will now default to ‘An Acceptable Life’ when you first start up the game.

Here is a full list of the changes in Alpha 1.3:

New Features

• Added Sue Doku scenario
• Added Stanford town map
• Added Libarian and Library Assistant occupations
• Added Library location
• Added fluff Education courses (Elf Spotting 101, etc)
• Added some more location background chats
• Added custom resolution setting
• Added low hygiene event
• Added Bachelor Of Philosophy
• Added preset ambitions to custom game setup
• Added default goals to preset profiles
• Added edge scroll and WASD scroll speeds to options page

Gameplay Changes

• Added Fun increase when eating out at Fast Food/Restaurant
• Changed working part-time wage penalty from 25% to 20%
• Removed knowledge gain from town hall courses
• Added Eat From Canteen to Trade School and University
• Implemented partial knowledge gain towards goal for partially completed education
• Major reduction in price of diplomas and degrees

Fixes/Improvements

• LOTS of internal changes to allow more versatile scenarios
• Added checks to prevent crashing when invalid xml
• Internal changes to scenario triggers to allow branching storylines
• Internal cleanup of start menu pages
• Fixed end of week crash randomly happening
• Changed Bartender avatar
• Added some missing sound effects
• Fixed wearing clothes from possessions panel removes table headings
• Reformatted Apply For Job and Quit Job windows
• Added more details to knowledge goal breakdown in weekly summary
• Current studying now displays as a progress bar

I’ve made a few changes to the reward tiers to hopefully provide better value to supporters.

Firstly, I noticed some people were happy to support us at the Worker tier, but had no interest in getting their name in the credits. So I thought, what could I offer instead?

One of the unique things about This Grand Life is the city maps you play on, which are created from real cities. I go through a special process to create them and it took two months to figure out how to do it.

I thought I could offer an insight into this process, so I wrote a manual describing how to create the game’s maps using satellite data. You can even follow the instructions to create your own home town!

The manual will be available to all Worker tier supporters and above.

Secondly, after a request I have added a tier called ‘The Manager’. In addition to the other stuff, it also gives you a custom portrait in the game of you, your friend or your pet. You get a high resolution version for your personal use as well.

That’s it for now. I’m still working on changes to the Education system, which I’ll talk more about next time.

A new feature in the next version (1.2) of This Grand Life will be collectibles. I’ve made a video update demonstrating this feature:

To start a collection, firstly you have to purchase a container from the Shopping Mall. For example to start collecting Stamps, you need a Stamp Collecting Book. I found requiring purchasing a container was the best way to do it, as it allows the player to completely ignore collectibles if they’re not interested in it.

Once you have something to store collectibles, you can attend auctions at the Town Hall to start bidding on them.

If you win the auction, the item gets added to your collection. You can only have one of each collectible, even though there may be multiples of the same item up for auction. Each item has a different rarity and prices that reflect their rarity.

In total there are currently about $50k worth of collectible items, ranging from Doll, Coin, Stamp, Video Game and Jewellery Collections. They all contribute towards your possessions life goal, so they provide an alternative to buying Fridges and TVs in working towards that goal.