Devblog 18 - Alpha 7 finished!

Hi everybody! I'm really happy with all the progress we did on Alpha 7. Now we are pivoting to Alpha 8 which focuses on leveling the town to the 4th type of customer - Upper Class. It will be a quicker alpha and I want to avoid introducing scope creep/mechanics for this part of the game.

Plan for Alpha 8 -

• New Customers - The Upper Class - Time to start luring in the wealthy humans of the apocalypse

• Make the town evolve and look nicer at level 4

• Make level 3 town look more 'under construction' since they are just building up from apocalyptic shantys

What we got done in Alpha 7 -

• Second Floor Upgrade for your shop

• Employee - This was a huge win and goal in this alpha, i wasn't sure if I was able to figure out a basic employee AI

• More shop expansions

• Decoration/Tipping Mechanic - Making decorating your store actually rewarded

• Relic Furniture - Added a bunch of collectable furniture you can fish out in biomes

• Upgrades - This was the highest voted, players wanted the current mechanics to have more upgrades/higher levels like composters, freezers, storage, aquarium, auto weigher

• Minor Mechanics - The weather radio for example

• UI Improvements - Making decoration and fish points cleaner/easier to understand

• Lore System - You can now fish out lore hard-drives from the ocean and unlock little world lore - For people not interested they can just sell them!

• Front Yard expansion

What did not complete in Alpha 7 -

• Cleaning/filth mechanic - It was the lowest voted mechanic on our community vote - We can see in the future if we even really need this in the game

• Pet Obesity/Choosing new pets - This was fairly low voted, I know some people would love to have more pet choices but it seemed like a low priority - So we'll wait and get the game closer to 1.0

• Painting Tool - I was surprised this was voted very low as well! I thought people would really want this so it's great we did a vote. This would have taken some serious time to make, so we were able to make a lot of progress in other areas. We can revisit this next shop alpha

Tipping - Customers leave tips if you decorate your store

New higher level composters

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Higher level garbage cans

Higher level deployable crate

New Lore Mechanic

Fancier higher level selling shelves

Weather Radio Mechanic

Aquarium Mechanic

New Store Signs for later game

Generic Shelves

Auto Weigher

Simplified and cleaner fish point interface

Nameable signs to put in your own slogans/labels

Whacky Inflatable Tube Bass

LOTS of new decorations to find from biomes - Only showing a few here because so many were added!