Alpha 2.4 – Workshop Support and more Advanced City Options

Steam Workshop

This part is mostly about Steam workshop support, but Itch.io players can still modify their games by specifying where their mods are stored in the options.xml file!

Hooray! It's arrived. Steam Workshop support is now available for This Grand Life, which means modders can create their own Cities, Career paths, Education courses, Collectibles and so on. If you want to subscribe/play a mod, it will need to be done from the Steam interface. If you want to upload a mod, you can do it from the new in-game workshop button.

Throughout development I've tried to keep moddability in mind, so there really are a lot of things that can be changed. Think a degree takes too long? Or maybe the Janitor earns too much? You can modify those values. Using education as an example, you can create a map trait that changes study speeds and then add it to the map to change all education speeds. Or you can overwrite the data for one degree only and leave everything else the same.

Some players have been asking to be a criminal. It seems to be a popular thing for some reason. I don't think it fits in the base game, so I've added a Professional Thief freelance business to the Workshop. It's a good mod example that uses the business, education and possession systems. Killing two birds with one stone, as they say.

When you add a mod, the products it adds will even appear in the in-game Infonet as if they were part of the game. Players can easily find information about where the modded items are sold, where courses are located, etc.

You can even use event triggers to create your own scenarios, similar to the tutorials and Sue Doku scenario.

I still haven't moved all the translatable text to data files, so there is still quite a lot of hard-coded English. I am gradually progressing towards this goal.

More Advanced City Options

There are also two new advanced city options in this update, Infrastructure Funding and Worker Organisation. Changing Infrastructure Funding will modify the tax rate and travel times to simulate how well the roads and public transport are maintained. Changing Worker Organisation affects overall wages and job competition. Be careful with this one, moving it to the extremes could make it impossible to afford rent or impossible to find any job openings.

What's Next?

As I was planning out the relationships and family part of the game, I came to realise it can't be done as a small feature. There are too many interconnected parts. So I'm going to be making relationships a major feature, similar to the freelance business and stock market mechanics. This means it will take a few more months instead of the usual couple of weeks to implement. Hopefully there will be plenty of mods to entertain you in the meantime!

Alpha 2.4 Changelog

• Added Infrastructure Funding advanced option
• Added Worker Organisation advanced option
• Added display for wage adjustments from advanced options
• Added education cost adjustment display when applying to study
• Upgraded internal data files writing system
• Implemented product editing, city map loading and portrait loading for modding support
• Implemented Steam Workshop uploading support
• Added check in options.xml for mod folder if couldn't auto find it
• Added Professional Thief mod
• Added Scoreboard implementation (currently disabled)
• Fixed goal display for education and happiness being currency converted
• Added popup if could not find default mod folder