The Customer Pool Building Update

Daily Update - March 5th, 2025

Hey all, happy Wednesday! I've got a big update to drop today, so i'll just get right into the details.

Previously, customers would enter your shop at a given rate, and were chosen randomly from amongst all implemented customers. This has been totally reworked to give players control over which kinds of customers enter their shops.

 You now begin each month with a basic "Customer Base", consisting of a few basic kinds of customers.

You also start the month with a "Lineup Size" of 2, which is how many customers will enter your shop on any given day, guaranteed. This can be increased to a maximum of 6 customers per day by spending money on improving your line size at the end of a sales day.

 Finally, the player's shop now has a "Word of Mouth" score, which can be spent at the end of a sales day to choose new customers to add to your Customer Base.

 Whenever you begin a new sales day, customers are now chosen randomly from amongst the customers in your personal Customer Base, and line up until the line is full. 

Customers now also have an "Influence" stat, which represents how much "Word of Mouth" your shop gains if you fully satisfy their preferences before they leave your shop (shown here in a little heart icon).

 To make tracking this easier, Satisfied preferences now have a heart icon applied to them once they are satisfied.

The effect of all of these changes is that there is a new gameplay loop, consisting of satisfying customer needs to gain more word of mouth, which can be used to expand your customer base and let the player build out a specialized customer base that might or might not match up with the kinds of items they prefer to sell. IMO, this is probably the missing piece of the puzzle in terms of letting players control all the parts of their "build", now that the customer pool can be "built" as part of your run. 

I think it'll be pretty fun, and give me a bunch more gameplay levers and knobs to play with for balancing too!

This is a pretty major change, so I'm electing to bump us up to v0.10.0! The changelog here is mostly UI and underlying system tweaks to make all of this work, so here it is!

Changelog (v0.10.0)

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• New Feature/Major Gameplay Update: Personalized Customer Bases, Influence, Word of Mouth, and Line Size, see the above devlog for more info.
• Gameplay: Added some rough draft values for Influence, starting customer pool, and customer word of mouth costs when adding new customers to your customer pool. Likely not well balanced yet, but that's for playtesting to decide.
• Gameplay: Added rarities to all customers, which determines how often they appear as choices to add to your customer base at the end of a sales day
• UI: Added UI elements and tooltips for all of the functionality described above
• UI: Added displays for Word of Mouth and Line Size to the topbar
• UI: Added a brand new customer pool viewer, and button to access it via the topbar
• UI: Moved the card for sale UI tab down to the center of the customer card's right hand size, for improved prominence
• UI: Made the Customer Card UI a bit more consistent in many ways with other card UIs (various spacings and such)
• Bugfix: Fixed tooltip for Disliked Aspects not appearing as expected