I've been hard at work developing the Shopping Mall Manager game I briefly described earlier this year.

The game still doesn't have a name, but other than that, the progress has been steady!

I decided on building it with Phaser.js, like my previous games, mostly because it's the framework I'm mostly comfortable with. This time though, I wanted to do it all in Typescript, and so far, the experience has been mostly great, types give a new structure to coding, and Phaser seems to have a robust support for it already.

Below is a couple of screenshots of my progress in the past weeks. Please note that every single texture is just a placeholder at this point in development 😅

In the above screenshot you can see some critical components for the game:

• Time control in the upper right corner of the UI (play/pause, 1-3x speed, time indicator below those)
• Money in the bottom right (Get rewarded at the end of the time period, placing objects costs money)
• Shops Menu (Clicking the button opens a menu with shops which you can place on the lots on the map)
• Object placing menu (For decorative purposes only, at the moment)

Here's a bit further on in the development. The big change is that I added support for Tiled tilemaps (with working collision metadata 🥳), the tilemap in question is loaded from Tiled export JSON file and objects can be placed on it accordingly. 

The next steps

Next things I will be probably working on will be the business side of things, so money management, financial reports, rent from shops, maintenance costs etc. And maybe I can actually find a graphic designer to help me with the artwork! 😅