Shady Deals v0.8 Sneak peek

v0.8 is coming out as an update without a specific theme. Initially, i planned to focus it mostly on gang war, but after some playtesting I realized that the constantly triggered gang heat events already provide enough to do during the capturing process. So, this update is mostly about various additions that (hopefully) improve replayability and make the game loop less tedious. Well... maybe the health changes might actually make things a bit more annoying - but at least they make a lot more sense now.

Preliminary Changelog

New Implementations:

• During a gang war, you might get attacked by enemy goons on their turf (once per day). Unlike regular gang heat events, you can’t just walk away - you’ll have to either seduce or fight your way out. The result will increase or decrease war progress and heat accordingly.

• Captured gangs can rebel during a general heat event if your gang morale drops too low (below 20).

• You can now hire loaders for your warehouse - they’ll pack shipments automatically. You can also set up priorities for each shipment type.

• It's now possible to hire any type of worker (farmer, mechanic, crypto technician, loader, chemist). There’s a good chance to spot a “Looking for work” ad on Gig.gles, which lists the worker type and a one-time hiring fee.

• Keybindings for fast travel are now available and can be configured in the Settings menu.

• Health is now a dedicated stat. Max health still scales with traits, but your current health now persists between fights and events and can only be restored by sleeping. The more stamina you have at the end of the day, the more health you’ll recover. And yes, rough sex or harmful events can reduce your health outside of combat.

Changes:

• The depravity and morale impact of giving drugs/aphrodisiacs to NPCs has been increased 3x - temporarily. This will be rebalanced in v0.9 once more ways to affect NPCs will be added.

• All gang types now reduce morale by 1 instead of 2, but more morale-draining events will be introduced.

• Added "loader" NPCs to Downtown and Suburbs.

• More drug and steroid dealer slots unlocked for each captured turf. Reduced their heat too.

• Now, to create a gang, you need to have 3 handguns in your inventory - not in your stash. I originally planned to remove the stash entirely, but it currently serves as the way to distribute drugs to your drug and steroid dealers. I want to keep that small micromanagement aspect in the game.

Fix:

• Stats gained from cheating are now persist between days.

In the pipe

Ew, that’s a smaller changelog than usual, huh. Most of the time went into implementing loaders - hiring, daily packing progress, payments, the priority system that checks all available resources in your inventory, tie-breaking randomness when multiple shipment types share the same priority, etc. The health rework and stash removal also made me revisit a bunch of older stuff and systems to properly integrate changes. And a significant part of the development time actually went into the v0.7 patches.

But hey - who really cares why it took so long, right? It is what it is. And maybe I was just pouring too much water into previous changelogs anyway.

What's left to do before the release?

• I still need to finish a system that checks whether gang job slots are overfilled if a turf gets recaptured (to avoid leftover workers in limbo).

• Add special yapping from gang leaders when your heat with their gang gets too high.

• Add a money icon that scales visually depending on how much cash you have.

• Event where a gang member spots you dressed like a slut while you're out on the street - ignoring them might lower gang morale (with cooldown, of course). I want to add at least a few events like this soon, since daily morale change now is lower and not enough organic ways to decrease it - which you need for turf recapture to happen.

• Slightly more media for car/outdoors sex, since most of the recent content is in that theme anyway. There’ll also finally be more ways to trigger these events outside of a few specific fail states.

I’m planning to finish everything by June 21, probably in the evening. Might move some of the unfinished stuff to post-release patching.