The new year has seen quite a bit of progress made on the game as our growing team settles into a steady rhythm. We’ve been slaving away on developing and improving new systems, including the dynamic AI system, revamped building system, and a far more flexible 360-degree furniture rotation tool. The biggest of these challenges has certainly been the massive changes we’ve made to the building system, which will now allow you to build way more intricate and detailed hotels.

IMPROVED AI BEHAVIOUR:

A new system has been designed for managing how guests interact with the hotel and fellow patrons. We wanted to shoot for more emergent gameplay possibilities with less predictability, which is where this fresh dynamic guest AI fits in. As you know, there are many different kinds of guests with varying needs and priorities. The type of hotel you build, how you manage it, and how you price things will affect what kind of crowd you draw in.

This leads us to the guest review system we’ve been working on, which will give you an idea of how guests perceive your hotel and their overall experience within it. For example, if there is too much drunken behaviour or too many dirty rooms, guests may leave a negative review stating their grievances (unless they’re the drunk individuals). This bleeds into your hotel’s public rating, which determines what types of guests may visit in the future.

BUILDING SYSTEM:

A huge amount of refactoring has been done on the building system -- it’s pretty much brand new! Firstly, the system was entirely revamped to make it far more efficient with how it handles wall and floor props. Previously, wall segments were all separate objects that could be placed in two directions. This naturally led to quite a large performance hit and an unfortunate restriction of only allowing walls to be placed at right angles. The new system takes all of these wall pieces and smooshes them together into one entity for the entire floor. You’re welcome, frame rate.

This revamp keeps on giving, as it also enables you to build diagonal and curved walls! Your customisation options just keep on growing. Here’s a WIP gif of some of the functionality the new system offers. It’s still in heavy testing and needs a lot of polish, so expect something even better when it reaches your hands.



With the addition of curved and diagonal walls, we needed to update the furniture placement tool to allow you to place things down at different angles. A few kinks still need to be worked out and some new UI elements are on the way to make it easier to see how you’re angling things. We’re also working on a snapping tool that will snap furniture to adjacent walls incrementally as you drag it.

There is still so much more to do, but we feel that we’re well on our way to getting the core systems in fighting shape. All of this will enable you to create even more unique and interesting hotels to delight or torture guests. We can’t wait to see what you build!

If you have any burning questions or just want to chat with us or other fans, join us on our Discord server at https://discord.gg/fYkJWWk. See you there!

It has been a bit quiet over the festive season here in sunny Oz (not to mention extremely hot), and I am glad to be getting back into the thick of it! 2019 is going to be huge for Hotel Magnate. I can’t wait to get a playable version into everyone’s hands.

Before I delve into what this year will bring, I would like to announce the exciting news that our team has grown! You will probably notice them hovering around our Discord server and Twitter page like friendly worker bees. The first new addition is Sasha, who will be taking on some game design and production responsibilities, as well as helping to manage our social media and community.

Secondly, I would like to welcome Tobbi, a very talented programmer who will certainly help the project reach new heights. I’ve pretty much been entirely on my own for the majority of the project’s existence, so I am excited to see where all of this goes.


With our team growing stronger, we should see significantly more progress down the road. It will take us a little while to settle into an efficient workflow, but we are already upgrading our Unity versions to take advantage of the new HDRP (high-definition render pipeline), which will see dramatic improvements to the game’s shadows, lighting, materials, and performance.

We are in the process of fleshing out more complex systems, like staff management, the cash/money system, and the associated management UI you will be interacting with. This takes a bit of thought and effort, as this is where many of the game’s systems interact with one another. Another area that’s getting some serious design work is a system that semi-procedurally generates guests to achieve greater variety.

We apologise that there isn’t more to show just yet, but we hope to bring you some exciting new footage in the coming weeks.

It has been a lonely few months without our little chats, but it’s finally time for another progress update about Hotel Magnate. The past few weeks have seen further implementation of the new UI elements and development of Guest AI, alongside the addition of a few new furniture items. We have also begun recruiting a couple more willing victims to join our small crew to speed things up. In fact, we have a big announcement to make in the near future, so keep an ear out for excited screaming.



More Furniture:

Who doesn’t love jacuzzis? Fortunately, they’re part of the latest round of furniture additions we’ve made to the game. You can expect new gym equipment, fountains, and indoor plants. This is only the beginning of the furniture and decorations you can expect to see in the full game, but it already adds a lot of diversity to how you can design your hotel and what your guests can do.

Bug Fixing:

As always, we have been nailing out a few bugs/issues with the AI as we crack on with getting the guests to act more natural and behave as a hotel patron would. Guests now check in, sleep, perform their ablutions, eat, relax, and check out when ready. There’s still a lot of work to do in this area, but we are now beginning to see complete game loops.



More locations:

We’ve got a bunch of new locations in the works that’ll each add unique challenges and introduce different positives and negatives to your guests’ experience. For instance, a city location will be buzzing with more business-minded individuals, while a tropical island will attract more holidaymakers and the occasional dictator (wait, scratch that last one -- wrong game).

It’s time for another update, and it’s going to be hot! The last few weeks saw the implementation of the stair placement system, floor painting, an experimental fire system, UI changes, and further work on the Guest AI.


Stairs add a lot of verticality to the game, allowing guests to access higher floors/levels in the hotel. They can be built indoors or outdoors, and they will automatically remove any floor tiles directly above them. In the future, you will be able to purchase various types and styles that will certainly elevate your hotel’s aesthetic.



Floor painting takes a lot of inspiration from its older sibling, wall painting. It allows you to change the colour and texture of floors to your liking. There are many materials to choose from, such as marble, wood, carpets, tiles, and so on. We’re planning to add even more options for both floor and wall painting, so get your creative juices flowing.



The first iteration of the fire system has been implemented. This is designed to be one of the many ‘disasters’ that can strike your hotel. Fires can be started naturally or triggered by faulty equipment/electrical problems. Players will have to ensure their equipment is well maintained, and it wouldn’t hurt to invest in some safety equipment to avoid fires getting out of hand. As you can imagine, there is still plenty of work for us to do in this area, but we’ll keep burning through it.



Although we’ve mentioned AI improvements in previous updates, these last few weeks have seen some genuine progress. Some nasty bugs related to the animation system have been resolved, making it a lot easier to implement and test AI behaviours. Guests will now check in/out, sleep, drink, eat, and exercise. They’re beginning to act a little more human!

However, animation and character model quality continues to be a problem. If there are any experienced 3D modellers or animators reading this, or if you know of anyone who may be interested, please feel free to contact us.

We’ve also been spending some time implementing new management menus. We are still waiting on a few assets, but the menus for guests and individual rooms are just about ready. You’ll notice a significant difference between the old and new UI, with better transparency and less distracting colours.

Over the next month, we will be focusing our time on properly implementing the new management menus and working on more guest tasks, like gambling. Additionally, we’re hoping to begin work on staff behaviours soon, most likely starting with the cooking staff. If things go wrong with their AI in the kitchen, at least we’ll have a great way to test the new fire system.

Thanks for giving this a read! Don’t forget to sign up to our mailing list so we can inform you of things like release dates, closed testing opportunities, and our upcoming Kickstarter campaign!

The last couple of weeks have seen the initial implementation of quite a few important systems. Firstly, we have begun teaching the guests how to behave. As this is the service industry, we are naturally teaching a few of them to behave poorly. They now perform various tasks around the hotel, which, coupled with basic animations, makes them seem almost human. Secondly, we have added in a wall painting tool. This actually required changing much of how the current building system works. However, it greatly improves the aesthetic and customisation aspects of the game, so it’s well worth the effort.

Dont forget to check out our website and signup here if you would like to know more about closed beta, release dates, development progress etc.


After the room designation and chair placement system upgrades mentioned in our previous blog, the AI tasks became a lot easier to implement. We have kicked this off by implementing common tasks like taking trips to the restroom, showering, and sleeping. The focus will now be on crossing off other important tasks on the AI list.



While the new wall painting system took only 3 days of work to implement, it almost required us to rebuild the entire building system. Instead, it was decided that an older iteration of the system was more suitable for wall painting and saving changes, even though it lacked optimisation. However, our tests are showing that it isn’t performing any slower, so it was a sacrifice we are glad to have made. The new approach involves placing prefab wall segments containing a mesh for each side of the wall. When wall painting, the system automatically detects the surface a player is clicking on and switches out the desired material. Don’t worry, we’ll be writing up a longer post on the building system in the future. It’ll be quite the page-turner.



We’ll be focusing on adding in more AI functionality and surrounding game systems over the next couple of weeks. If you have any questions or feedback, please feel free to contact us here or through any of our profiles on social media. Thanks for reading! We hope to see you again soon.