Hi everyone!
For the past few weeks, most of my focus has been on Megastore: Tidy Up Together, as it was our newly released game and naturally needed a lot of attention around launch.
Now that things are settling down there, I can finally return my main focus to Megastore Simulator.
And as of today, work on the next update has officially begun.
The Customer Demand Update Comes First
As we mentioned in our recent posts, my first priority is the new customer demand system.
While working on Megastore: Tidy Up Together, I spent quite a bit of time thinking about how I want the underlying system to work. The general approach is already taking shape, and my focus now is on testing different combinations and finding the right balance.
The main goal is to make sure that customer demand can continue to grow as your store grows.
As you add more shelves, products, and departments, your store should be able to attract more customers, generate more sales, and ultimately become more profitable. In other words, expanding your store should continue to create new growth potential instead of eventually reaching a fixed demand ceiling.
At the same time, I want to introduce this without disrupting the profitability of existing saves and established store layouts. Finding a balance that allows stores to scale further while keeping existing setups viable is one of the main things I’ll be testing.
Megastore Simulator gives players a huge amount of freedom in how they build their stores, so I can’t realistically guarantee that every possible layout will scale perfectly. However, the goal is for the system to work well across the vast majority of normal store setups, so that continued expansion is consistently rewarded.
More Than Just a Background Algorithm
I also don't want this to be something that only happens invisibly behind the scenes.
This part is not finalized yet, and I will be experimenting with it during implementation, but my current direction is to make customer demand something you can actually understand, influence, and manage.
I want the game to communicate why your store is performing the way it is and help you make better decisions when expanding.
Eventually, this could also open the door to new management mechanics such as:
Advertising your store
Promotions for specific products or departments
Different ways of actively increasing customer demand
These systems may not all arrive in the same update.
The important part right now is building the underlying system in a way that allows us to expand it over time.
Long term, I want this to give you much more room for fine-tuning your store, experimenting with strategies, and making meaningful management decisions instead of simply placing more shelves.
The Daily Report could also become part of this. For example, it may eventually give you information or suggestions about areas where your store could perform better.
Again, these are things I will evaluate while implementing the system rather than features I want to promise before I've tested them properly.
Licenses and Existing Departments
Alongside the demand changes, there are also changes planned for the existing product systems.
The Grocery licensing structure will be reworked, and I also plan to introduce the ability to enable or disable licenses/products that you no longer want to sell.
This becomes especially important because of what comes next.
A Lot More Products Are Coming
After the new customer system is in place, the next major step will be optimization.
Megastore Simulator naturally becomes heavier as your store grows because every new department introduces more products, meshes, textures, and other resources.
And the amount of new content I want to bring into the game is significant.
The upcoming product additions could potentially bring the total number of products close to twice what we currently have. The exact number is not decided yet.
Without optimization, that could also mean substantially higher RAM and VRAM requirements, which obviously isn't something I want.
So before the large product expansions begin, I will be working on optimizations designed to compensate for the additional content and keep the game scalable as Megastore continues growing.
Bulk Product Updates
Once that foundation is ready, you can expect larger product updates to start arriving.
My eventual goal is to bring the products we created for Megastore: Tidy Up Together into Megastore Simulator wherever they make sense.
Tidy Up Together gave us the opportunity to create a huge number of new products across many different categories, and I would love to make proper use of that work here as well.
Combined with the new management systems, my goal is to make Megastore Simulator feel much closer to running a real large-scale retail store: more departments, more product variety, more decisions, and much more room to grow.
What About Megastore: Tidy Up Together?
While I'm working on Megastore Simulator, the other developer on our team will continue working on the Level Editor for Megastore: Tidy Up Together.
After I release one or two of these Megastore updates, I will most likely return there briefly for a final polish pass on the Level Editor.
After that, my focus will return straight back to Megastore Simulator so I can continue with the larger product and content updates.
Making the New System Easy to Understand
When the new customer system releases, I also plan to prepare an extensive guide explaining how everything works, what influences demand, and how you can set up your store around the new mechanics.
That said, my first priority is that you shouldn't need a guide to understand the basics.
Ideally, the game itself should give you enough feedback to understand what is happening, feel the effect of your decisions, and make sensible improvements naturally.
The guide should be there for players who want to dig deeper into the numbers and optimize further—not because the core system is impossible to understand without it.
Please Share Your Ideas
I wanted to give you a heads-up now that development has started because this is also a good time for feedback.
If you have ideas that fit within this direction, especially mechanics inspired by how real stores increase demand, attract customers, run promotions, or manage product performance, feel free to share them below.
I'll be keeping an eye on the comments while working on the system.
I'm very happy to finally be back working on Megastore Simulator.
See you soon!
