Daily Update (7/10/25) - The start of card upgrades!

Daily Update - July 10th 2025

Hi all! Today I decided to finally get around to starting to set up the ability to upgrade your cards! From a technical level, this turned out to be a lot more straightforward than I expected, so I'm pretty pleased with my past self for some good architectural choices. Woo programming.

In terms of game design, you'll eventually be able to upgrade your cards via the Daily Inventory view for the low low cost of 6 Influence. This'll add some tension between buying new customers, banning unwanted customers, downsizing unwanted cards from your inventory, and upgrading cards in your inventory, making Influence a really valuable resource with some interesting choices to make about how you wanna utilize it. Additionally, having card upgrades adds some fun possibilites for new event rewards, and design space in general.

The downside to all of this is that I'll need to come up with interesting upgrades for all of the tactics, but I did manage to get all of the common tactics done today, so hopefully it'll be done on the scale of maybe a week instead of a month. So, silver linings! Here's a quick preview of one of the upgrades:

Is gaining a temporary copy of the item you buy worth it? Up to playtesting I suppose, but it is definitely an upgrade!

So, since this is all unreleased so far, there's a good deal of invisible work in today's build, but here's the changelog anyway:

Changelog (v0.17.13)

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• Art: Added art for the Collect Rubbish, Quality Produce, Counteroffers, and Garbage Day tactic/mottos
• Text: Business Acumen now tells you how much you'll increase an item in value by during card selection
• Bugfix: Fixed Dumptster Dive not having any effect
• Bugfix: Fixed Take Consignment tactic being unplayable if the customer's item for sale was Trash
• WiP: Added internals and hidden UI to allow for cards to be upgraded during a run
• WiP: Added some upgraded card effects to all common tactics (currently unobtainable