Posted September 07, 2017 by PokingWaterGames
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:
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: