A New Picture-Show For Your Enjoyment

Chaos is in the air!  Last month was a busy month for sure, and this month looks to be about the same… I love it!  Last night I decided to upload a video to YouTube showing the new feel of the game.  (If you follow @H3Games, you would have known that already!) I really wish I had a bit more time to polish up the video, however Windows Movie Maker absolutely hated every video I threw at it last night and was not playing nice in the sandbox. (yes, must eventually get some authoring software)

The video is showcased below for your enjoyment.  Feel free to leave your thoughts.

Currently there are 13 total fixtures implemented in the game.  The HUD is going down for a complete overhaul currently, as you will notice in the video the only HUD item left is the Fixture Selection screen when building your store.   Its being redesigned to be cleaner, and more intuitive to whats going on in game.  These computer avatars are starting to have a mind of their own, and there will be a few components added to aid game play.

There is currently a basic implementation of shopping actions which are displayed above the shoppers head.  This makes it much easier to manage your store, and aids in managing the store in huge swarms of customers.  Model transparencies have been implemented in this release, which isn’t a huge thing to do but makes the progress videos look a bit nicer.   Some basic avatar “grab” actions have been added for when the customer is shopping, and will include the avatar “picking up” and item and holding it in their hand.  Now the most important update is to the AI and pathing.  The AI now has is the ability to base decisions on frustration tolerance.  Don’t have an item in stock?  That’s frustrating.  Waiting in a long register line?  Also adds frustration.  Walking through a coffee spill?  That may just be the straw that broke the camels back, and your potential customer is lost.  No big deal right?  Well your game is constantly adjusted based off a customer satisfaction rating, which will directly influence the amount of customers that enter your store later on in the week. (Who said there isn’t any power with word of mouth?)  And when your store is no longer meeting its sales targets, well… Don’t be surprised if your boss comes down and gives your a courageous conversation.

The next update will add some “fun” to its on-going campy feel.  The game fixtures are to be renamed with more interesting descriptions.  Sure I could have a “Ice Cream Freezer” in my store, but why would you want that when you can place a “Ice Cream Extreme Deep-Freeze” unit in there?  The idea originally started with a pun I made on twitter about George Clingerman’s coffee drinking tweets.  From that day forward the Convenient Chaos coffee machine will forever be known as the “Clingerman GW-5000 Series BrewMaster”.  Yes, I dubbed it that, however I’m all for the community renaming some in game items, so if you’d like to have a gander at the fixture list and submit a name, we’d love to hear your name!

Enjoy the video, more to come…