King of Retail 2 news & patch notes

--- New features

--- Balancing

--- Optimizations

--- Community stores

- Difficulty settings

- Reorganized tutorials

- Balancing

- Optimization

- Quality of life

--- Starter Stores ---

--- Adjustable game settings ---

--- Better game feedback ---

--- Improved employee management ---

--- New inventory and products ---

--- What is next? ---

--- Update log ---

--- End of Day ---

--- Customer behavior and simulations ---

--- New product management screen ---

--- Starter stores ---

--- Phones ---

--- What else ---

--- Geforce Now ---

--- Starter stores ---

--- Gameplay settings ---

--- Updated employee management ---

--- New storage and delivery units ---

--- New products ---

--- Workshop items ---

--- Player stores ---

Dear Retailers,

The year is coming to a close, but the days will only get longer from here. After 7 months of monthly updates, I’ll be taking a well-needed rest for the holidays. 

As the year comes to a close, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on the state of King of Retail 2, where we stand with overall development, and our plans for 2026 on the horizon.

The year isn’t over yet! But I wanted to acknowledge both the game’s successes and challenges, as well as the people who helped us along the way.

What We Accomplished This Year

Revamped Build Mode 

Launch tools for Building and the Display Designer were functional, but uninspired and overly confusing. We completely rebuilt Build mode from the ground up while introducing new features:

• Multiple floors, with escalators, elevators and stairs to connect them. And all the AI pathing nonsense that allowed it to be possible.

• A much more intuitive building block approach to setting down walls, windows and doors. 

The result? Some really impressive and incredible store designs from across the community. The general reception of the improved build mode was quite good and opened a lot of new creative avenues for store designs. 

Customers have Intelligence Now! 

Customer and general NPC AI has been added to continuously over development as they link to new supported features, so this continues to be an ongoing development goal all the way to 1.0 in the distant future. But as we stand at the end of year, AI has come a long way from its state at launch.

• AI understand access control now! And they won’t randomly walk into your stock room (unless you’re employing them) 

• Customers are more proactive with their shopping behaviors, adjusting where they go based on their needs, preferences, and if the store is available to cash them out.

My work on improving AI is never finished, as we’ll be adding new updates and features which will invariably add to the complexity of the AI. 

Multiple Stores & Team Management

The features I’m personally most proud of this year, just because of how much its opened up for future development. Multiple Stores & Team Management are two features which will get some adjustments in the near future, as the complexity of how these features are simulated will likely grow.

The idea of “managing a retail empire” has been a primary feature of King of Retail 2, and something that comes about more through a series of features rather than a single mechanic that allows it. Our Macromanagement update, released in September, is the first step to make that reality, but there will be more to come to complete that feature.

Community Features

The Community has always been an important part of the game, but also to me personally as a developer. You have been the sober second thought and my words of encouragement. Integrating community features was an easy decision to make because I knew so many of you would take to it easily. And you have!

• Community Workshop Integration 

• In-Game Leaderboards / Global Rankings

• Integrated upload/download of community assets into the game.

I want to focus on making features as accessible as possible, and I’m surprised and touched by the creations that have been made already.

New Products!

When we launched in May, the main offerings for stock and articles were men’s clothing and groceries. Since then, we’ve added expanded inventory in both categories while introducing Beauty Categories and Electronics dropping more recently.

Here’s a gallery of some of the designs that launched since then.

Ongoing product categories are still a big focus for development, and we plan to continue updating with new products, either standalone or as part of larger content updates. Rollout of new products will generally remain consistent, but I may move up or hold off depending on what else we have planned for updates.

What Comes Next in 2026?

A few months ago, I alluded to our development plans for King of Retail 2 being to “build wide before we build tall”, which I reflected in my approach to building out core AI interactions alongside new features, or the stages we’ll be rolling out the simulation of “offline” stores. 

As 2026 dawns, we’ll be looking at additional features and getting back to adding that upper crust to the game with a greater eye towards simulation.

Look forward to:

• Redevelopment of the HQ function, and putting executive spaces to work.

• Enhanced features for Team Management, including a deeper development of Employee learning, allowing them to inherit, pass on, and develop their skills and attributes.

• Marketing tools, including physical billboards to broadcast your brand.

• Talent trees for your concepts as you develop your businesses.

• Additional Leaderboard and Ranking types.

• And many, many more product updates to come.

2026 overall will be a big development year for core gameplay as we continue to widen out the simulated factors of Big Retail. I’m excited to share particulars on development in the New Year.

A Very Special Thank You

Finally, I wanted to extend a sincere thank you to the entire community for your work in supporting, testing, and generally being a positive force in the ongoing development of King of Retail 2. 

I won’t lie that developing a title in Early Access is difficult. I have my support structures in place from a development and personal standpoint, but the final product is always in front of you - or at least as much as I can make available. That includes early features but it also includes challenges, struggles, setbacks, and the core reality of game development. It’s hard work. 

Release was perhaps the most challenging, and there was a lot of technical and design debt that became apparent on release that we needed to address before we could start adding new features. I’m happy to say that we’ve overcome so much of that, and I credit the community for supporting me through the tough times.

I’m proud to say that the game is in the best state yet, and only going to get better in 2026. Thank you, everyone.

Join the community and see what’s in store for 2026 by joining the King of Retail 2 Community Discord. I’ll be scheduling one last livestream before the year is out, so catch me every other Friday on my Twitch channel. 

Until 2026, happy sales,

-Daniel

Dear Retailers,

Based on player feedback, we’ve adjusted how tutorials are handled. While the intention was to help new players get started and ensure core systems weren’t missed, feedback on the requirement to access the tutorial was quite insistent. As such, we’ve removed the requirement for Tutorials and baked some “Day 1” tutorialization into first playthroughs.

Tutorial Changes

• Tutorials are now fully optional again

• Added a Day 1 Guide featuring step-by-step tutorial videos for the City, Store, and HQ

• The Day 1 Guide can be collapsed at any time if you prefer to explore freely.

We wanted to make sure that essential tutorials aren’t missed by new players, and recognize that returning players shouldn’t/wouldn’t necessarily need that. I tried to strike a balance between both, while leaving all engagement with the Tutorial fundamentally optional.

Other Fixes

• Addressed several minor issues to improve overall gameplay stability

• Fixed an issue where Electronics products were not properly reflected in reputation data in existing saves, allowing them to be sold correctly

Tutorial feedback is still very welcome, as I see this a constantly-refining process and will remain a key area of focus up until 1.0 release.

Thanks for the quick feedback, and enjoy the holidays!

Until next time, happy sales.

-Daniel

Dear Retailers,

The holidays are officially upon us with the start of the Steam Winter Sale, and we ARE participating with our lowest discount yet, with up to 25%. In all likelihood, if you’re reading this, you’re probably already a player. But if you have any friends looking for a deep Retail simulation, now would be the best time to put that in their gift stocking!

Enough shilling, as we have a host of new updates, fixes, and content ready for the Sale. We’re doing a lot of under-the-hood work this update, but with changes that should improve the experience for everyone and better realize the fundamental gameplay behind King of Retail 2.

Actually, there’s just one more plug I’d like to make before we move on:

The Winter Retail Challenge is Ongoing

Just a top-of-mind reminder that the Winter Retail Challenge is in full swing on our Community Discord. If you haven’t joined yet, and are interested, make sure to check it out.

With holiday assets already available in the Steam Workshop, your own assets, or any combination of to create your own winter-themed retail masterpiece. Supermarkets, boutiques, tech stores, malls—anything goes, as long as it embraces the season and shows off a festive cheer. 

We’re accepting screenshots or short videos (whatever is easiest) to be submitted in Discord. 

Entries will be judged on creativity, theme execution, store layout and flow, use of seasonal decorations, and overall festive charm. We’ll choose the Top 3 creations, and we’ll be providing a Steam Gift Card for the top ideas.

We’re running until January 5th, so give it a shot and maybe win a prize for your design.

And with that, let’s move onto 0.3.4.0 Patch updates and what’s in store!

Huge Engine Improvements - Faster Loading, Bigger Stores

A week ago, a player reached out to me due to an issue with AI customers not working. I took a look at his save and, lo and behold, there were over 300 NPC’s in his store during busy hours (it was a very big floor space) and had over 144,000 stocked retail items.

Suffice to say, this had a huge impact on performance. It took me 1½ hour to get through a day in his store on my mid level machine due to constant lagging. So I took a look and managed to improve the performance greatly.

To break things down, we’ve improved King of Retail 2’s engine handling to address 3 major issues:

• Stores can eventually get too big, causing load issues and slowdown as the game both has to render and maintain individually stocked items, as well as customers. =

• The number of allowed AI controllers would cap out at about 300, leading to additional customers having no behaviors. This resulted in customers clogging entrance ways with no behavior or intent to buy anything (realistic, but not quite the realism I was going for) =

• 300 customers evaluating 13.000 different product locations is a lot of calculations, and only worsens with more customers or products

Now when opening or loading a saved game, products now load in progressively instead of trying to do it all in one process, which reduces RAM spikes, and the need of looking up the same thing multiple times. I also changed the way customers evaluate products, so they evaluate a random subset instead. This means you can now add as many products as you like, without it increasing this need for calculations. Then I changed the way customers navigate as well as doing some manual changes based on distance, like when do animations need to be seen, when should they be raytraced etc.

In essence, this has been a fantastic opportunity to stress-test King of Retail 2, and it’s allowed us to make a lot of under-the-hood changes to improve overall performance during regular play. And the store that lagged and took me 1½ hour to get through 1 game day i can now play on increased speed without issues. So those of you with big stores should feel an impact, and now be able to go even bigger!

The New Tutorial System is Launched!

Tutorialization has been a big challenge to tackle, in part because we have so many open-ended ways to approach the game, either from the top-down or bottom-up, that its tricky to know exactly where to start.

With an all-new “Learn to Play” function in the New Game menu, we’ve introduced a 4-Step Tutorial that covers the basics of how to play, without dipping too heavily into scenarios or extensive pre-fabs that hold your hand step-by-step. I’ve identified Finding Information and Menuing to be among some of the big things that become stopping points for new players, so we’re introducing players to not only the flow of gameplay but also how to move, find things, and access features.

This is a bottom-up approach at its core, at least initially, as we know the general fundamentals of gameplay are both valuable to get into early but also less likely to change as we progress through Early Access and add new features to the top-level.

If you’re new to King of Retail 2, I encourage you to check out the new Tutorial mode and leave your thoughts in the comments below or in our Community Discord, as this is an active initiative that we’ll be continuously improving until 1.0.

This is My Electric Feel: Electronics Product Update

Long requested, and given enough time so that we can get the products right: Electronics will be making their way into King of Retail 2 with this latest update, with more Electronic products to come.

Perhaps one of our biggest brand catalogues in terms of sheer possibility and diversity, Electronics are the big money makers of big box retail, and now they’re yours!

With today’s update, we will be launching with Consumer GPUs and Video Games as product categories. We’ll also be looking at adding other computer hardware, including RAM hardware, in future updates to come in the new year.

GPUs will also pilot the new Trending Demand dynamic for customers, who may prefer particular models and colors which can change throughout the year. Buying a variety of stock and being reflexive about your stocking choices can now pay off with more frequent sales.

Full Patch Notes Ahead!

Coming today in update 3.4.0

Major

• Overhauled tutorial system to be more interactive and with GIF's

• Removed tutorial flow from main game.

Minor

• HQ are required from day 1

• Reduced loading time drastically when managing properties in the city screen

• Improved product overlay layout

• Tutorial panels gets transparent when hovering them

• Adjusted expand store menu

• Change to soft pointer references for all product meshes and material (Optimization stuff)

• Changed product importing flow, which should result in lower memory spikes upon loading

• Added see through effects on display controls

• Changed save game load process to account for high product numbers

• In game hud auto scales to fit within the menu

• Changed distance from where animations are showing

• Changed distance from where face morphs are applied

• Changed distance where raytracing is applied

• Adjusted AI movement behavior

• Added version trending system for GPU's with updated twice per year.

AI

• Failing to take a product due to luxury value, needs are reduced as if taken, to make this having an effect and not just be time waste

• Customer will not look at same product twice.

• Sales staff can reduce the luxury penalty by 30% based on skills and interaction

• Added product batching where AI evaluates a random selection of products to avoid lag spikes in large stores

• Increased maximum allowed AI rates

Bugs

• If next customer exceed the max AI limit, customer will not spawn

• Updating all store product counts when leaving the store

• No more AI sidestepping

Products

• Added GPU's

• Added games

• Added mascara

• Added perfumes

Featured Mod of the Week

This week, we’ll be looking at some of the fine Displays uploaded through the in-game designer. Our Featured Mod today is the Display Skin Care 3x3 / Hautpflege Regal 3x3 by Lady-Kasya, which is one of several sized display styles specifically for skin care.

Coming of the back of our October update, these elegant displays are perfect for premium, luxury brand cosmetic and care products. Consider joining the Steam Workshop and popping a few in your next boutique.

-

We’ll be sharing some additional news closer to the end of the year with plans for 2026 on the horizon. Many, many gaps have been closed over the last few months in order to streamline gameplay and improve the base experience. We’re not there yet, but the new year will entail more in-depth features and new additions the game that I’m excited to share with you soon.

As always, consider joining the Community Discord as it’s really the most direct channel I have to hear your feedback and suggestions, as well as look over your Winter Retail Contest submissions, so please have at it! I’ll be on my Twitch channel tomorrow, streaming development live, so please also pop in to say hi, and possibly get a sneak-peak on what’s to come next year.

Until next time, happy sales.

-Daniel

Dear Retailers,

We’re closing out the year with a series of updates, and I wanted to leave 2025 with something for everyone: newcoming players and veterans of Retail alike. As part of the upcoming Steam Winter Sale, we’ll be tackling a number of items, namely improvements to the game’s tutorialization, some additional sales behavior, and product updates.

Let’s get started with an early look!

Community Event: Winter Retail Challenge 

To celebrate the holidays. we’re kicking off the Winter Retail Challenge, a store-design contest!

Using assets from any source you to create your own winter-themed retail masterpiece. Supermarkets, boutiques, tech stores, malls—anything goes, as long as it embraces the season.

Players can submit a screenshot or short video of their store. Also write a quick note about your concept and what inspired it.

Entries will be judged on creativity, theme execution, store layout and flow, use of seasonal decorations, and overall festive charm. We’ll choose the Top 3 creations, and we’ll be providing a Steam Gift Card for the top ideas.

The contest will run until January 5, and will take place primarily on our Community Discord, meaning submissions and announcements will be happening HERE, The time frame is to give participants plenty of time to build, decorate, and share. So show us what you can do, and help fill the community with holiday cheer!

Learn 2 Retail Better - Tutorialization Improvements

The world of Retail is overwhelming. In the real world, most businesses don’t turn a profit for years, and are always at risk of financial hardship and struggle. Running a retail business is hard work. The critical decisions that owners have to make, even on a day-to-day basis, can make or break the business.

We wanted to reflect that level of complexity on all levels of the game, from physical arrangements of stores all the way up to a sort of retail “grand strategy”. From employee behaviors to shopper preferences: the goal is to model the retail experience in the most compelling way possible.

But we’ve heard a lot of feedback from both long-term players and newcomers, and we understand that knowing how to play King of Retail 2 is just as important.

We’ll be completely revamping the Tutorial experience within the game. Originally, we wanted to teach players the basics of setting up their store, designing it, ordering products, so we can get people into the gameplay as quickly as possible. While we are covering the essentials, it’s not getting players comfortable with the interface, the controls, and ebb and flow of gameplay.

Scenario-Based Learning!

So we’ve gone back to basics on a number of areas, introducing new Tutorial Scenarios that place you in pre-built stores and scenarios. The intent here is to get you acclimated, know how to find information, and get you doing something closer to what an employee would do on their first day.

We’ll be following a logical step-by-step in totally optional experience that will cover each set of mechanics in a series that goes:

Dear Retailers,

Whether you’re meeting people at a work mixer or flushing your DNS for the twentieth time that night: Networking is hard work. 

But the best business never evolved in a vacuum. It takes collaboration, teamwork, and stick-to-itiveness. That’s why I’m proud to announce that November’s update, focusing on expanding King of Retail’s online functionality, is now live for all players!

The B2B Networking Update brings many online integrations into King of Retail 2 to make it faster, easier, and more intuitive to incorporate community creations into your stores, connect with the community, and share your designs online.

Let’s get right into it.

Hustle Across the World - Steam Cloud and Workshop Integration

In what will be a small but very welcome addition to the update, we’re introducing Steam Cloud Save support, which syncs your saves automatically across devices. No more transferring folder (no more renaming folders, either). 

In-game save imports are also added to the build, making it easier to share saves between other players. This is a potentially huge opportunity for future opportunities in creating pre-fabricated saves, but that will be something we explore down the road.

Meanwhile, we’re also proud to announce that Steam Workshop Support has entered it’s first phase. What that means is that now:

• You can build, design, and share Displays from directly within King of Retail 2, directly to the Steam Workshop.

• You can browse, integrate and place new designs from the Workshop in mere seconds.

• Upload designs as you make them, directly to the workshop.

• With our external editor tool, you can create custom textures and objects and share them with the community.

We’re rolling out additional functionality for the Workshop as we progress through Early Access. I’m very excited to see what players share from their own design library!

King of Retail 2 Editing Tool is now Available!

For the discerning modder amongst you, we’re now also able to offer the King of Retail 2 Asset Editor, available from the King of Retail website. Using this, you’ll be able to create your own Custom textures and custom graphics for integration into the game!

This early release focuses on texture-based customization (such as wall and floor designs) and includes the groundwork for more sophisticated asset creation down the road. I’m also looking into how to better integrate the editor into the Steam landscape, so I hope to have some news on that shortly as well.

I’m continually blown away by some of the incredible creations that the community has done with the tools we’ve had on hand. I can’t wait to see what a better tool will allow players to do with their designs.

Compete for the Crown with Online Global Leaderboards

Retail can be a competitive business: time to see how you stack up.

The new Online Global Leaderboard visualizes the performance of players across the world in a living 3D cityscape. Your cumulative sales generate your “building” in the skyline, rising or falling as you push your company forward. 

Currently, our Leaderboard allows you to.

• Compare global rankings.

• Filter for friends

• Track your total sales across all saves

Data is fun to play with, and I’ll be introducing additional data sets in the future to let you see what other sales goals we can push forward.

Products Built by Excellence

We also have a backlog of new product updates to introduce with today’s update, take a look at what’s available below. Our focus this cycle  is very broad, and going to get broader, as this is only the first part of several releases before the end of the year.

What have we got for you?

• Beauty Products, including Lipstick, Mascara and Nail Polish

• Skin Care Lines, facial creams, facial masks.

• Soaps and Expanded Toiletries

• Over-the-counter pharmaceuticals, vitamins, supplements, whey protein, nutritional oils, and herbal remedies.

• Hair care, including brushes, shampoo, conditioner, cleanser.

• Warm male fashion, including sweaters, sweatshirts, and hoodies.

This is only the first stage of new product updates. Stay posted for more to come soon!

Full Patch Notes

Major

• Steam Cloud save file management

• Steam workshop management

• Updated to Unreal version 5.6 (better lighting, faster performance)

• Upload custom displays to workshop in-game.

• Browse and download workshop displays directly inside the store

• Steam leaderboards. Compare yourself to other players.

• Workshop room, for managing and browsing workshop content.

• Upload custom wall and floor surfaces to workshop.

• Upload decorations to workshop.

• Added workshop tab for painting walls and floors

• Updated Display selection menu

Minor

• Added first time cheat confirmation

• Added title to cheat menu

• Display pictures are redrawn on opening the game, to avoid missing pictures.

• Changed dislpay thumbnail look

• Doorbells doesn't go off when store is closed.

• Doorbell activation area is limited to when door is crossed

• Adjusted colission sizing in escalators, so they can be placed up against each other

• Notifications when employees are arriving to work

• Notifications when employees are going homs

• Notifications when employees are taking a break

• Staff workzone shows when you hover their icon

AI

• Customers dont enter the store 35 mins before closing

Products

• Hair Masks

• Hair Conditioner

• Hair Shampoo

• Supplements and Vitamins

• Lipsticks

• Nail Polish

• Brushes and Combs

• Fragrances

• Soap Bars

• Hair Styling

• Mens Knitwear

• Mens Hoodies

Bugs

• Display designer capture images looks proper again

• Removed build funds (will be added when building cost money)

• Removed bug where file selection would open over and over again

• Inside doors no longer doorbell sounds

• Fixed bug where AI would not cross doors at certain areas

• Crashing bug where two employees with no relations to each other would cause the game to crash.

• Bug where escalators pointing in certain directions would cut holes in floor wrongly is solved.

• Windows should respect weather as well as being inside

• Bug where an employee having 0 hour schedule would ruin team score

• Plots at corners of T, X and L road segments can now be built on.

• Removed blue box surrounding windows

• Fixed bug where multifloor escalators did not load properly

• Stairs should not stuck the person when going to it

We’ll be showcasing player creations in future updates, so if you’d like to get your mods and designs a shoutout, make sure to share them on our Community Discord, screenshots or Steam links are perfectly fine. And, while I may be busy with testing and fixes, be sure to join our Development Stream every other Friday on Twitch.

Until next time, happy sales. – Daniel

Dear Retailers,

Two weeks ago, we discussed the implementation of online features for King of Retail 2, and we’ve made huge strides since then that we’re ready to start discussing now that we know they’re feasible and achievable for our upcoming update.

Now that I’ve done my due diligence with Steam integrations, and Steam Workshop functionality is nigh, it’s time to look at how this upcoming functionality will open up the community experience for King of Retail 2.

Create Your World – Model & Texture Editing

Mod functionality will be incorporated into King of Retail 2 in the next update.

The Discord and the Community Page are abuzz with fan creations, including custom art, logos, and some really cool and novel designs. But a common question we’re getting is “when can we start creating custom assets for the game?”

I’m always touched by the creativity players bring to their stores. Now, let’s take it to the next level.

We’ll be introducing an editor program for King of Retail 2 with next update, which will allow players to create custom textures and introduce custom models. 

An early view of the editor environment in motion!

However, we’ll be looking at early implementation of this feature in order to get this out the door, with improvements to come. That means:

• The editor will be available as a download from the King of Retail website, at least initially. 

• Integration as part of the Steam launcher will come at a later date, once the executable is finalized.

• Initial editing will focus on allowing custom textures, intended for wall and floor decoration. More features will be expanded in the coming weeks.

We wanted to extend this tool for those in the community looking for new customization tools, and to bring community creations to the upcoming Steam Workshop.

Compete for the Crown – Online Leaderboards

Our second major upcoming feature shifts the spotlight from creativity to competition. Retail is a competitive industry, after all, and why not see how the opposition is making their mone?

We’re introducing Online Leaderboards, a global ranking system that tracks the success of retailers around the world in an in-game 3D diagram.

Your rankings will be visualized as a living cityscape, where towering buildings represent the world’s most successful players. Your own progress, and that of your friends, is on full display.

Stand tall and shake the markets when Global Rankings drop in the next update.

You’ll be able to filter by friends or global results. At the moment, we’ll be calculating sum sales across all player saves. As we continue to update this feature, we’ll be looking at building significant segments like:

• Specific sales by Store or Concept (looking more at singular playthroughs)

• Employee or Management Metrics (who’s fired the most employees?)

• Reputation within the city.

We also see this system as the starting foundation for future community events and competitions. One idea we’re currently mulling about is integrating Leaderboards into seasonal challenges or scenarios. This feature is still very early on in ideation, and we’ll continue to build out Leaderboards in the meantime, but I’d love to hear your thoughts.

We’ve also taken great care and caution to make the Leaderboard as fair and accurate as possible. There are always going to be gaps, but I’m committed to finding them. ;)

A World Built with Players

We’re incredibly excited to see how you’ll use these tools, and we’ll be looking for player feedback as they roll out. Our next update will be announced in the coming weeks, and will consist of everything we discussed today, as well as updates to introduce the Steam Workshop and Steam Cloud functionality. We also have a considerable product update on the horizon, so stay tuned for a new catalog. 

As always, join us on the Community Discord to share your thoughts, ideas, and (soon) your Workshop creations. I’d particularly love to hear what you think could fit into our Global Leaderboard feature, and what you’d like to see tracked. 

Also be sure to check in with me on my development channel on Twitch every other Friday. Watch me develop, and share your idea!

Until then, happy sales.

– Daniel

Dear Retailers,

This week, I’m excited to announce that we’ve integrated some long-sought-after Steam integrations into King of Retail 2 as part of the next update. This means that players can enjoy Cloud Save support alongside Steam Workshop functionality in the coming update.

These were long-requested changes, and one we’re approaching progressively as we add in-game features to better support them. I’ll go into each below in parts so people know what to expect and what will be available with this update.

Retail Anywhere – Cloud Save Support

In last update, we fixed issues with save file preference files, to make save importing smoother. With Steam Cloud Save integration, we’re introducing Save File management into the game.

Finally! No more manually moving save files, no more lost progress. Whether you’re on multiple devices, reinstalling after a system wipe, or just want better options than local sales, your empire will always be a sync away.

We’re looking for better ways to integrate, save importing, and organization going forward, now that functionality is online!

Share Your Designs - Steam Workshop Integration

The second feature, and one I’m particularly excited to continue developing, is the early implementation of Steam Workshop support.

We’re beginning a bit modestly with integration to ensure that every Workshop feature is well integrated into King of Retail 2, which means seamless imports and in-game exporting will definitely be added to additional design features as we add more.

Workshop will initially launch with the ability to upload and share retail display designs,  giving players an entirely new way to exchange ideas and showcase their creativity. You can add displays from the Workshop while in the store, meaning you can browse and buy community displays in seconds!

We’ll be focusing this first phase of Workshop integration specifically on design sharing — keeping it lightweight. At this moment, as well, we’re looking into how to support custom images that are transferred between both saves and workshop items. I’ll have some updates in the near future how we plan to address this.

Next on Deck - Products on Backorder!

It’s been some time since we’ve introduced new products. We haven’t been idle here. In fact, product packs have been going at totally normal and steady rate; something we’re always doing in the background. 

I put a small pause on releases while we got major feature updates out of the way and bug-tested, but it’s time to make up for lost time!

Our next Product Lineup update will include:

• Shampoos

• Conditions

• Hair Dyes

• Skin Creams

• Hand Soaps

• Pump Soaps

• Shampoo (“For Men”)

Followting this new pack, we will be introducing Electronics with many varieties of products including PCs, PC accessories, graphics cards, games, movies, TVs and more. This enormous new category will be introduced over time and has been a long-requested addition to the catalog. And alongside these, we’ll be expanding Men’s Fashion and introducing Women’s Fashions in short-order.

I absolutely want to hear your feedback on Save and Workshop integration, and the best way to weigh in is on our Community Discord. This is a tool I want to bring to the community to make sharing and designing in King of Retail 2 better than ever, so your input is the first consideration in adding new features for Workshop support. And make sure to drop into our Dev Livestreams every other Friday.

Until next time, happy sales.

-Daniel

Dear Retailers,

We’re now in Autumn season, and we’re keeping the focus on stability, polish, and quality of life improvements to King of Retail 2 as we prepare features for our next major update.

With update 0.3.1.2, we’re putting a lot of attention toward making your stores more responsive and your employees more manageable, while continuing to streamline backend systems for smoother play overall.

Just a note that King of Retail 2 will be on sale starting today until October 21st for 20% off! I’d be deeply appreciative for people to get the word out, as we do still have a demo available to play as well!

Smarter Teams, Smoother Stores

A new Team Order menu has been added to the Staff Management portion of the Store Hud. With this, you can now assign which number of cash registers you’d like open at any given part of the day.

• You can now send employees home for the day, giving you greater control over scheduling and labor management. It’s also an excellent spot-fix if business is slow on any day. 

• Cashiers are now significantly more responsible, and will finish their Active Queue of customers before going on break.

• Cash duty interactions are greatly improved, with fewer weird overlap issues if a register closes while another worker is on the path to open one. Overall this should make cash behavior look and feel more intelligent compared to earlier 

These small additions tie directly into our ongoing goal of making the employee system more interactive. We plan to add additional tasks in the coming months, but we wanted to set realistic standards before adding new tasks, and just hoping Employees can figure it out on their own. 

QoLs and Big Ticket Fixes

We’ve also added a few significant improvements across the board:

• Day/night toggle in Build Mode (finally!) lets you visualize the store at night, rather than just building it for daytime traffic.

• Stronger distinction between items in Stock and items on Display - this should help with, at-a-glance, determining what’s in circulation for sale and what’s in storage.

• Save games are now handled individually—no more relying on user preferences files. This should make it *MUCH* easier to share save files between players. Just a note that, at this time, custom images won’t transfer between saves which may cause some visual issues. 

All in all, these changes should make daily management smoother and more predictable.

Performance, Bugs, and Beyond

As always, we’re continuing to address long-standing bugs and performance hitches. From saving and UI responsiveness to store scheduling, charts, and HQ functions—this update squashes a host of issues to make daily operations smoother.

Here’s what we’re talking in 0.3.1.2.

Major

• You can now send employees home for the day

• New team orders in the store. Tell how many cash registers should be open

Minor

•  Added day/night toggle in build mode

• Added confirmation when going to build mode

• Save games are handled individually and not through userprefs file

• The ordering button is disabled if you cant afford the order

• Employee hover arrows are now visible through walls as well

• Product overlays have separate entries for products in boxes/delivery units.

•  Added general distinction between products in storage, and being unpacked

• Product store counts are updated regularly during the day, and on leaving store.

• A Product’s local price is only active if enabled

AI

• Employees react faster to switch tasks if you take charge of the cash register

• Customers moving to a closed register will now look for a different one.

• Customers stay in the queue after the store is closed

• Cashiers now finish their queue before going to break. If only open register, they will leave as is.

• Cashiers will finish the queue at the end of the day before leaving.

• Cashiers will also look at who is approaching a register in determining if they should close it or leave it open.

• Customers will now wait 20 seconds to see if a cash register becomes available before leaving

Balancing

• Increased overall team score-based sales performance.

Bugs

• Build mode now always displays the current time and weather as Store mode.

•  AM/PM times no longer makes double lines in Hud

• HQ rooms saves their positions properly after being moved

• First time display load lag could cause multiple displays to be spawned

• Closing screen during negotiations open the proper relevant menus

• Selling inventory have proper prompts and same audio/visual feedback

•  HQ Sell Room menu doesn’t close after selling a room. This has been fixed.

• Sell/buy at 0,00 doesn’t cause weird UI issues.

• Sales confirmation prompts can be closed with ESC. Attempiting to move inventory in store mode have proper audio feedback.

•  Interaction menu will reopen if it’s still overlapping the Inventory screen when moving or selling inventory 

•  Grid moves up and down with moved inventory to other floors.

•  Doors properly remember rotations from build mode to store mode.

•  Rotating door now triggers build mode confirmation

•  Game crashing when having 2-week scheduled employees, and going to team management.

•  Selling inventory will not return double the paid price

•  Product overlay only counts products on display for value in-store:

•  Product overlay now counts storage units properly

•  Game settings did not save properly when changed

•  Window-spacing distance should now be the same in build and store mode

•  Cash registers reset sales stats each morning

•  Deleting saved games doesn't have load lag.

•  Bug in store schedule swapping even and odd weeks in dual week schedules

•  Store schedule is now scrollable

•  Selecting show only sold in product summary, actually shows sold products

•  Product sales charts no longer converts units sold to currency.

•  Customer flow chart count not converted to currency

•  Customer flow chart buttons is set to enabled by default

•  Customer flow properly shows selected time

•  Min/Max ordering should rigidly follow what is in the store

•  Fixed animation blueprint allowing for idling poses to occur more than once pr .character

•  "Type" data sets can also be removed from sales charts

•  HQ pc properly upadtes store funds when selecting store to manage

As before, we’re building the next few steps of the game Wide, not Tall, with a focus on depth and stability as we plan out the next major update.

Your feedback continues to drive that work—so please keep it coming through the Community Discord and our feedback channels. And as always, come visit me on my Twitch channel every Friday to see development-in-action and share your feedback!

As always, keep your shelves stocked and your cash drawers balanced – which should be easier now that Employees will be smarter about staffing them.

Until next time, happy sales.

– Daniel

Dear Retailers,

A huge thank you to everyone who jumped into the Macromanagement update with last month’s update. We’ve gotten enormous feedback from players on both Macromanagement’s Employee update and Rise to the Top’s building improvements.

As we move into the next phase of development for King of Retail 2, I wanted to take a moment to talk about what’s coming up on the horizon and our focus for development through the end of 2025.

My priorities over the next few weeks will be to strengthen our foundation: building better moment-to-moment interactions within our existing systems frameworks to improve how stores operate, add functionality to teams, and better define the role of the player at the enterprise level, managing multiple Concepts and Stores.

Building Better: Expanding the Core

The next several patches will revolve around improving existing features—especially those that govern how your stores feel and function behind the scenes. That means:

• More Products: We’ve held off on product updates with the Macromanagement update just because we had a huge feature push to worry about. With that out of the way, we’ve been hard at work designing additional products, which we plan to introduce in a coming update. Store Task Systems: We’ve laid the groundwork for teams, roles, and management, but now we’re taking that further. Employees have a fairly limited range of tasks to perform at the moment, which underutilizes the Employee system on a whole. One of our early additions will be looking at Store Cleaning, which will provide a new role and new interaction for Employees to take on as a task. Over time, we’ll be adding new tasks and behaviors to Employees.

• Employee Evolution: At the moment, Employees do have fluctuating and changing attributes, mostly reflecting an individual’s change of habits over time. With the Employee Heirarchy system in place, we plan to add functionality

• Technical Improvements: I also want to be conscious of the amount of technical debt that has accrued (and always keeps accruing) over the course of the last few months. Now that we’ve added some vertical features, this is an ideal time to work on improvements on UE5 integration directly and prepare the game for future additions.

This is all part of a larger effort to make the experience of playing  King of Retail 2 feel more interconnected. Making your game loop more compelling, more seamless, and easier to engage with isn’t always the most exciting or flashy of things to update, but it’s very necessary that we build our foundations properly before we start striking new ground.

Sharing your Designs: Workshop Functionality

We’re also looking into Steam Workshop functionality, and plan to roll out some initial integrations that will allow players to upload and share some custom creations across steam directly.

Full Workshop functionality, as in the ability to create custom assets or mods, isn’t planned quite yet - that’s something we’d like to address closer to launch. But our Discord is already full of Store and Display designs from players which, while they can be shared, still must be done manually. 

I will have more updates on Workshop functionality as we explore how best to integrate it with King of Retail 2, but we plan to roll out Workshop support in stages to allow players to share their designs with other players.

Performance, Quality of Life, and Player Feedback

I know I say it a lot, but it always bears repeating:  your feedback matters—a lot more than you think.

Performance improvements and quality-of-life refinements have become an ongoing priority for us. Every patch brings optimizations to help stores run smoother and faster, and we’ve been combing through your feedback to identify the small, everyday frustrations that we can iron out.

So thank you to everyone who’s been submitting bug reports, sharing suggestions, and helping us test new builds. You’ve been instrumental in shaping King of Retail 2 into something stronger.

Looking Ahead: Built Wide, Then Tall

Our next major milestone update, which we’re planning for early next year, will be the  next “vertical” step in King of Retail 2’s development. We want to build out our base before we get there, but we can also take a look ahead at what major plans we have in store.

That update will focus on building out Headquarters, which exist in the game but provide limited functions (it’s mostly your administrative hub). Additional office spaces, functions, and more use of the multiple floors of HQ will all be built out to add more reason and purpose to sitting in the Big Chair.

But for now, our mission is clear: build it wide before we build it tall.

As always, you can catch me doing Livestreams every Friday on my Twitch Channel, where you can watch me work on King of Retail 2 and ask me any questions or send me your feedback or suggestions. And as always, make sure to join the Community Discord where you can find design ideas, report bugs, and follow the development of King of Retail 2.

Join the King of Retail 2 Discord!

Follow KoR2 Dev on Twitch!

Until next time, happy sales.

– Daniel

Dear Retailers, 

First, the “Rise to the Top” update added verticality through elevators and multiple-floor stores. In the meantime, we’ve been introducing quality of life changes to fix up build mode and help players realize their multi-level store complexes.

But throughout King of Retail 2’s life, there’s been a recurring trend: the player has to do nearly everything relating to running a business. Employees can pick up some of the slack during the day, but you always have to be there to keep them acting.

No more. Today, we announce the launch of the “Macromanagement” Update. Now, employees come to the forefront and become the building blocks of your retail empire. It’s time extract the Human Resource and put your employees to work. 

As well, with the update, we will be joining the Steam Autumn Sale for 20% off this Monday, September 29th until the 6th of October. So if you’ve just discovered King of Retail 2: welcome! Here’s what you can look forward to in today’s update.

Macromanagement Major Updates

Run Multiple Stores!

This is our highlight feature for the Macromanagement update. In today’s update, multiple stores now generator concurrent income through the addition of Store Automation. 

Stores will currently, hour-by-hour, generate revenue based on real-time dynamics between your store, your customers, and your staff. This feature is only the first of many improvements we plan to make to Store Automation in order to build out complexities and ways players can run their stores at a distance.

To run your stores, you’ll need a capable team that you can rely on in your absence. That brings us to…

Employees, Ready to Work!

Team Heirarchies have been implemented in the latest version as an accessible UI from your Headquarters computer. 

One of our biggest ongoing bits of feedback are that employees do too little, putting a lot of busywork in the hands of owners. Team Heirarchy addresses that at its root, while opening the door for tons of new employee features in the future.

In this view, you can assign teams to manage stores on your behalf. Assign your team heirarchy, taking into account that your Manager sets the example for their team to follow, and that every team member needs support and structure in their workplace.

Promote Your Employees!

Inherent to Team Heirarchy is the roles of Manager, Assistant Manager, and Team Leader that are now available as assignable to your staff through the HQ. 

Each serves a different role, structurally, in the management of your store. 

Team Managers - Represents the store when you’re not there. Managers need high skills, as their talents (or lack-thereof) will have ripple effects on other employees productivity, mood, and workload. A strong manager can bring a team together, while a weak one will disorganize them.

Assistant Manager - Can serve multiple roles currently. In small stores, they can act as a manager when the Manager is off, but they can also work in a delegative role in larger stores under a Manager, in order to lighten the load during busy shifts.

Team Leaders - Team Leaders oversee specific functions, spaces, or departments within a store. This also allows you to break up your Team the same way, dividing the workload within your store around what specific roles you need done. Large grocery stores need Produce Teams and Stock Teams, while smaller stores may want rotating shift teams. The choice is entirely up to how you’d like to build your store.

Employees - Employees have had their functions assigned to areas in past update, now Teams can fully organize those for your store. In future updates, they will also have the ability to learn and grow by having positive work experiences with trained Team Leaders and Managers above them. 

As with Store Automation, this is a constantly evolving feature, as we introduce new behaviors into the mix and expand intra-team relations (more on that after Patch Notes below!)

Macromanagement Update - Patch Notes

Update 0.3.2.0 changes are below!

Major

- Team hierarchy management

- Non-visited stores earn money.

Minor

- Made some skills hidden

- Skills have different weights towards the average score contribution.

- Adjusted, added and removed skills

- Skills are sorted by importance

- Removed EA disclaimer when buying second property

- Added short employee tutorial open entering HQ on day 2

- Added wiki entry about team management.

- Adjusted evening lighting levels on city map to be lighter, even in the worst weather

- Adjusted city zoning colors to be more balanced in all lighting.

Bug Fixes

- Saving and loading roofs are now working properly

- Blue customer has colors again

- Conference room floor is now showing properly

- Adjusted selected colors of wiki buttons to be blue

- Can open wiki and settings properly in the HQ

- Only paint floors is now possible in HQ

- Improved ESC functionality in menus (still need city)

- You only see the employees of the given store in employee overview

- You can now say no to deleting a role

- Adjusted customer overlay UI where names overlapped each other

- Adjusted product info to fit trends properly.

What’s Next?

Once again, with another update out of the way, it’s time to consult the roadmap.

We're looking to continue to build functionality into Employee behavior and build out store functions within the team, but we’re also going to be looking at additional smaller updates down the road to flesh out the experience of the features that we’ve already added.

Store Maintenance

With employees hard at work, a good business owner, indeed any good manager, will need to find more tasks for employees. 

“Store Maintenance” is where we’re starting: introducing additional tasks and visual features into the game that reflect the general wear and tear of your store as hundreds or thousands of customers walk through the door to peruse your items, track rainwater across your floor, and generally misuse the perfect store you’ve built.

We’ll be introducing new behaviors progressively depending on the nature of our updates, as Employee behavior is an always-on development goal. But Store Maintenance will allow us to build out the visual changes to the store and create fun new tasks such as:

• Cleaning, facing and merchandising displays to keep them tidy and stocked.

• Cleaning floors, as rainy/snowy days can lead to water being tracked inside the store.

• Dusting and cleaning under or overused displays. 

• And much more, there’s really no end to drudgery if we put our mind to it!

Quality-of-Life Fixes

While the last thing we’lll be talking about in this update post, I want to stress that, after two major updates, the time to refine and improve the game experience is more important than ever. 

We wanted to build a strong cadence to push major features out the door with “Rise to the Top” and “Macromanagement”, but I’m personally conscious that there is such thing as too quick a pace when it comes to major updates. In the near-term, we will be actively sourcing feedback from the community and testing these new Employee features rigorously, while also picking up a host of visual and technical fixes that are long overdue.

We won’t be long off from the next major update, but since one has just arrived, I hope you take the time to explore what Macromanagement has to offer, and I ask for your support in the coming weeks to make it even better.

This Friday, I’ll be doing a livestream and going over any questions, comment or feedbacks while you can see me work on King of Retail 2. Please join me on my Twitch Channel, or join the Community Discord and let us know what you think.

Until next time, happy sales.

-Daniel

Dear Retailers,

Last week, we posted an update teasing some features coming to our next update, the new “Macromanagement” Update, which we can now say will be ready before the end of the month.  It’s time to look in more detail at what new employee functions will be introduced in this update, which is all about bringing Employees to the forefront to introduce store automation.

A Foreward on Store Automation

Independently-running retail stores have been a hotly requested feature ever since our initial demo launch back in February. This has been a design challenge, as a lot of features need to be functional in order for “authentic” automation.

No,w what do I mean by “authentic” automation? When we represent actions that are occurring off-screen, we can do it by two broad approaches:

• “Summarize” events as they occur from an input-output perspective (“Money generated is a function of X, Y, Z variables) so that the game generates an outcome.

• “Itemize” events by generating and resolving them in real-time, so that actual things occur and their outcomes occur dynamically and possibly in real-time.

To most players, the outcomes seem the same, but are based on different calculations. The latter is more sensitive to changing attributes and is closer in line to the experience we want to simulate. Automated stores that simulate entire shopping days are more responsive to the customization and care that players bring in.

As of the next release, we will be introducing Store Automation, but it will be introduced in stages in order to test and refine automation as a whole. That means that early iterations of automation may be closer to “Summarizing” work days than “Itemizing” them, but that will be our springboard to better refine the system in the coming weeks.

The Noble, Lonely Manager - Stressed in All Things

Now onto our next feature coming into the next update: Team Roles!

We’ve got an updated Team Heirarchy UI that allows you to build custom team roles down to a store and even a departmental level. Let’s dig in:

A preview of our upcoming Team Hierarchy view

Team hierarchy is divided into four broad categories of employees:

Team Managers - The principal worker in charge when you’re not at the store. With the coming update, this role will be functional when you’re not present, but will defer to your manual control for the time being while you’re occupying the store.

Assistant Manager - Works like a secondary manager, and takes over as full Manager on days that your Manager is off work. 

In larger stores, they can share the workload with the Manager and other AMs. All teams will incur a “Workload” to reflect how labour is distributed among the team, and one Manager can’t do everything on their own. That’s where Assistants step in to shoulder the load.

Team Leaders - Team Leaders serve as the guiding force of any established retail Team. Working closely with employees also makes them effective coaches. In later updates, Team Leaders will be able to coach individuals under them, with attributes that can make some TLs better recruits for trainees, or to specialize in specific departments or tasks.

Employees - Not to be forgotten, life doesn’t just end at the Entry Level. Employees will be able to learn and grow under experienced leaders and co-workers. Employees form the core of any team, and can be directed to specific tasks and eventually specific store areas as team functions are expanded upon.

What Influences a Good Team?

Rather than get into the math, let's look at practical applications of employee attributes and how they’ll relate to improving Team Dynamics once the feature is introduced in the next update.

• Individual relationships between team members and with store leadership can affect work ethic, mood, and eventual workloads.

• Relationships between Team Members change dynamically as they work together for a long period of time. Positive relationships can encourage both parties to work harder and tire out less easily, while long-term negative relationships can disrupt an employee’s work ethic.

• A Leader’s own Positivity skill can emphasize existing positive relationships, building a kind of “social synergy” that adds to team harmony. Conversely, a Leader’s Conflict Resolution skills can manage and even improve negative relationships.

• A Leader’s supervision skill dictates their capacity for additional work, allowing them to take on and delegate more tasks. For Employees, this same workload is dictated by their Teamworking attribute.

• Highly motivated leaders can pass on their motivation to their employees and improve worker quality.

• Worker quality is based not only on their individual personality and qualities, but also on their scheduling preferences. So if workers are doing the task they are best suited to, that will, of course, increase the quality of their work.

• Supervisory and Leadership skills are emphasized the higher a role a worker occupies, and are consequently less important the lower they are. To develop good leaders, you’ll sometimes need to develop up-and-coming leaders as opposed to natural talent.

• Employee skill progression will be based on their own Talent skill, as well as their leader's teaching skill. The teacher’s own ability at a specific Skill also affects their ability to teach others.

• Teams without proper leadership or insufficient numbers are less efficient and become overworked more quickly without proper support.

As mapping and modeling worker behavior is an ongoing process with many, *many* complexities to account for and test, this is only the starting point of how we plan to build more dynamic, smarter, and more interesting employees to join your Team.

What’s Next?

Automation and a mini-roadmap of how we plan to proceed with Automation as a design concept will be part of our next reveal, as we also launch the second of our major milestone updates: The “Macromanagement” Update. 

This is a huge undertaking on the backend for King of Retail 2, and something we absolutely want to hear your feedback on. Be sure to join the Community Discord, where I’ll have more news to share leading up to the launch. As always, your feedback is appreciated.

What do you want to see your employees do next?

-Daniel

Dear Retailers,

We’re rapidly approaching the end of Summer and it’s time to start looking ahead to our next update. With “Rise to the Top” last month, we looked at Building and Designing and saw some incredible designs. But the next update is on the way.

That being said, we have an enormous amount of work ahead of us, so while we are looking forward to a definitive “Red Letter Day” to get everything live, a lot of these releases will be coming out progressively over the next few weeks.

So as such, I’d like to start revealing some of the new systems coming into play with the next update, and how those pieces will eventually come together.

The Challenge: Simulating Reality

Throughout the pre-release and release of King of Retail 2, everything players do happens and responds in real time. In-game sales occur when an in-game customer picks up an in-game article from an in-game display, and so on. 

In summary: everything happens as a consequence of something else, which is turned influenced by a huge number of environmental and contextual factors, right down to the mindset of the customer and the work attributes of your employees.

In short: simulating this when you’re not around is quite difficult. Our end goal is to create simulated and automated store activity for stores not under operation, using as much information based on player decisions, designs, and – for the purposes of this update, a look at how Employees will keep the lights on when you’re not around.

Employee Teams - Putting the MEAT in TEAMS

At this stage, employees follow what we call on the business side a “Flat Heirarchy”. All employees are equal to one another and share responsibilities, roles, and functions. The player character is the exception to this rule, leaving all employees answerable to the player. 

A preview image of how players will be able to craft their own team heirarchy

Employee teams will be your day-to-day employees, assigned by store, that allow you to begin building workforces that work when you’re off doing something else. The structure will develop as automation is added, but in the short term, we’re adding functionality to:

• Build, customize, and assign teams within your stores.

• Assign the Manager role: the individual representing the store while you're away.

• Build out a hierarchy for your team, including Assistant Managers, Team Leaders, and basic Employees.

This is where it begins, but where it can go opens up many, many opportunities for store automation.

Team Dynamics are Everything

The level of detail we’re building into Team Dynamics will as comprehensive as our parameters allow, and knowing how we’ve strurctured employee attributes, each individual employee will work differently with other employees, simply down to personality differences and shared (or differing) values. 

Relaxed employees may not jive with hardworking employees. Cleanliness-focused employees won’t appreciate working under a slob of a manager. And slackers of all kinds can drag down the team dynamic and spoil everyone’s work ethic in the long run.

Conversely, employees can build bonds through shared values over time, energizing them to go above the call of duty and put in extra effort in turning a profit for your businesses.

Scheduling and team sizes also come into play. The ratio of Leaders to Workers is essential to running a healthy team! Too many managers? Wasted time and money on oversight, and too little actually getting done. Too few? Managers will get overloaded and overworked. Team Leaders and Assistant managers step into this dynamic to allow you to break up large stores into manageable dynamics.

We went back to the books to faithfully recreate corporate retail work dynamics!

The outcome is that the overall quality of your team and its organization will affect the income that stores can generate when you’re not around. The quality of the manager and their relationship with their team, and the relationship between individual team members all play a part in how hardworking your stores end up being.

This will also result in specific Manager traits affecting the long-term growth of the team under them. If a manager is a better teacher, then their team can develop their work skills under them. If a manager is confrontational, it can worsen mood and work ethic among the team so choose wisely. Constantly rotating teams also creates its own challenge, as teams that work long-term together can build positive bonds.

How we're representing employee behavior, from a very ground level.

The end goal is not only a novel challenge for players who want to dig into higher level retail management: but also the ability to correctly and compellingly simulate store activity while the player is away doing other things. 

Teams are but one of the many, many factors that will allow this to be possible in future updates.

What’s Next?

We’ve gone over what Teams can bring to the table. Next week, we’ll be revealing what each new role brings to Stores, and how you can start promoting from within so players can start building Teams of their own. These will include what to consider when assigning Managers, Assistant Managers, and Team Leaders.

What makes a model employee ready for promotion? We’ll get into that next week. In the meantime, join us on the Community Discord where I am going into great detail on upcoming features. It’s really the best way to get active updates, but we’ll be sharing more info when more becomes available.

All the best, and see you all in the aisles.

-Daniel

Dear Retailers,

With the Rise to the Top update, we’ve seen some tremendous feedback from players and some really incredible creations. Thank you to everyone who turned out for our update and got involved in the community Discord: your input means a lot to this project and its continued development.

So, I’d like to begin by talking about next steps for King of Retail 2, with our first major milestone update out of the way: what’s next on the horizon? 

Scaling Up, Bridging Gaps, and Improving The Flow

Some of the major changes you’ve seen: additional floors, access control, the newly rebuilt Build Mode have all been, in their own ways, challenging but necessary improvements that lay the groundwork for bigger and better features. 

We can think of it as addressing technical debt, but also in reapproaching the fundamentals of building and designing so that the core game experience is as enjoyable as it can be. Thank you for bearing with us as we refined build mode and improved customer behavior, and it resulted in a system we can be genuinely proud of.

Catching Up, What Have We Done So Far?

1. Employee assignable work areas.

With the last update, we allowed staff to move up and down. That means a lot of wasted time for employees if they do this often.

Now they can assign which areas an employee is allowed to work at, meaning a much higher level of control, and better efficiency of your employees.

2. AI overhaul

We went into the first step of making your employees more intelligent. They will only refill displays that actually have products in stock.

No more constant checking if there is room for unpacking new products etc. No more running long distances to accomplish a task nearby.

3. Bugfixes and better info layers.

We have fixed some of the bugs that you have reported (and will continue to do so of course). We also noticed some of the info layers. (Zone layers in city, spacing zones in build mode) are rarely activated, which leads to confusion about the various possibilities of the game. 

So instead of being disabled by default, they will be enabled instead, hopefully bringing an easier onboarding and handling of your game. You will still be able to turn them off manually.

And What’s On the Horizon?

Our next milestones will focus on building out two major parts of gameplay that are in high demand, and which work together to build that second layer of strategic gameplay that will define King of Retail 2: Team Management and Second/Automated Stores.

Team Management - Promote from Within!

Soon, we will add functionality for you to assign Team Managers. Managers will manage stores on your behalf, using their expert-level skills (you are hiring the best, right?) to keep your rank-and-file employees active, increase your store income, and take some of the manual work off your hands so you can focus on the bigger picture.

You may ask: what purpose does this serve if you’re already on hand to manage the store yourself? Well, it's a very critical component for allowing the addition of…

Adding More Stores to your Empire

In the current build of King of Retail 2, stores go offline when you’re not there. Many, many players are already exploring design possibilities in their second, third, and more stores; but there’s a lack of true managerial oversight that we’re working on bringing into the game in the coming months. Second stores and beyond can be fun, but they’re money sinks at this stage.

With the ability to set up multiple stores and assign internal management teams for them, we’re working towards fully automated stores that function and produce while you’re dealing with other things. This brings together Store Concepts and the overview map and will add a full new layer to the gameplay.

It’s time to start thinking bigger about retail, and our next few updates will make bigger and better things possible. Again, if you have any questions or suggestions, our Community Discord is not only the best way to get a hold of me, but also to chat with the community at large. 

Thanks everyone, and we’ll have more updates coming in the future.

-Daniel

Dear retailers,

Today is the day! The Rise to the Top update is live in King of Retail 2. Download and play now, and enjoy a 25% discount as you grow your empire to new heights. 

Let’s take a look at what’s in store!

UPDATE HIGHLIGHT: Escalators, Elevators, & Stairs, Oh My.

The doors open nice and smooth in-game, don't worry; it's just the nature of the tiny gif.

You’ve been able to build multiple floors in your stores prior to this update, but now, their functionality has been fully implemented. After much testing and tweaking, your customers can travel between the floors of your establishment as they see fit. This feature unlocks a tonne of floor space for customisation that gives you more room to shape your store’s identity—or even build a full-scale megastore. 

But how did they get up there?

Well, you’ve got three options. Elevators, escalators, and stairs!

Slot these into your store and bask in vertical glory as your customers ascend and descend throughout your retail masterpiece. Upper floors are now fully functional, just as your ground floor always has been.

I’m really excited to see what you’re able to pull off with this expanded scope, and whilst we’re on the subject of customers, let’s move onto…

UPDATE HIGHLIGHT: Access Points & Customer Flow

Originally, customers would squeeze their way through your established entrances however they saw fit, which could feel unnatural and cause them to exhibit… “unusual” behaviour. But now, you’re the one in control.

Following player feedback, we’ve added additional options to any door that you place in your store, letting you change their functionality to serve as only an Entrance, only an Exit, Both (the standard setting before this update), and finally, Courier-specific doors. 

That way, you can now direct the flow of traffic and set up a back entrance exclusively for deliveries.

We’ve covered foot traffic, we’ve covered your delivery setups, as well as all the extra space you now have to stock those deliveries.

So, let’s take a look at what new products have been cleared for sale in your store.

UPDATE HIGHLIGHT: New Products!

With the Health & Beauty line having been introduced in our previous major update, we’re expanding the articles available even further with Rise to the Top.

Take a look.

The new additions are as follows:

• Face Cleansers

• Sunscreen

• Body Lotion

• Self-Tan

• Scrub

• Deodorant

Add the new line-up into your store with this latest update, make use of that extra space, and ensure that all of your customers are feeling both healthy and beautiful.

UPDATE HIGHLIGHT: Build Mode - Ceiling, Roofs, and Intuitiveness

This update marks a major milestone. The changes began rolling out in smaller chunks across earlier patches, and with Build Mode: Expanded as the first step on our roadmap, I’m delighted to see it fully realised today.

We’ve covered the vertical aspects of Build Mode, but there's still more to discuss.

With two new features, the Ceiling Painter and the Roof Designer, you can now further tweak how your store looks both inside and out. Together, you’re able to customise your ceilings just as you would with your walls and floors, and you’re also able to add some more personality to your roofs, with slants, glass panels, and much more. 

But that’s not all.

Previously, your inventory (as in, your shelves, registers, etc.) could only be edited when you were in your store in-person. This was a bit fiddly, as it meant you’d need to hop back and forth between Build Mode and your store if you wanted to adjust everything.

But I am happy to say that it is no longer the case.

Your inventory can be relocated directly from Build Mode, making reorganising your store so much more intuitive. 

Although the expanded Build Mode is complete and I’ll be proceeding with the next steps in the roadmap (more on that below), I’ll keep my eyes and ears open for your feedback on these changes, just in case they ever need a touch-up or a hotfix, so please keep your feedback coming. It’s extremely helpful!

Rise to the Top - Patch Notes

With those highlights taken care of, below you’ll find the full list of patch notes for the Rise to the Top update, which you can play right now.

Major

• Removed all wall placement limitations; elements can now go across multiple walls, rather than being restricted by a segment.

• Direct the flow of customers by assigning Entrances, Exits, No-Access, and Courier Entrances.

• Added Chinese Translations,

• Added elevators, stairs, and escalators to your store.

• Upgraded the engine version, leading to reduced raytracing noise on material surfaces.

• Added the Ceiling Painter & Roof Designer tools in Build Mode.

Minor

• Big entrances can be moved left and right.

• Updated the door and wall element hover UI.

• Added UI buttons for door entrance usage.

• Couriers now use Courier-specific entrances, if applicable.

• Save games convert properly to the new system.

• Added virtual "lava" to Entrances, and No-Access doors, preventing the AI from going through them, unless they have no other option.

• Added a new construction rule: at least one Entrance and one Exit, and doors can’t overlap anything else.

• You can now move inventory around in Build Mode.

• Shapes no longer influence the location validation of your inventory.

• Product decorations no longer influence location validation of your inventory.

• Lamps produce light more cleanly.

• Posters can be scaled up.

• Increased the usage of door sizes.

• Pins from renting a shop now stay open after the rental of your first shop.

• Reduced the camera lag in Build Mode.

• Anything that can cause an error in Build Mode now has a marker showing what’s causing it.

Bugs

• Closing the painting menu will properly reset the hovered item.

• Reduced the customer spawn circle, as they could spawn out of bounds, making them immobile.

• The Floor Painter now selects the proper material when opened.

• Increased the latest work hour based on a store opening from 10:00 to 16:00.

• Going to work now looks at the proper day itself, and not the hours from the day before.

• Added collision to the bank building.

• The Load Game year now shows in the proper format.

• Quick-Deleting in Build Mode will ask for confirmation first.

• Reviewed all product names and tweaked them to proper English.

• Fixed a bug that calculated the wrong price of an item when opening the store with a non-default currency.

• Windows now have proper weather effects on them.

• Corrected products that exceeded display limits.

• Resetting or confirming a build in Build Mode now properly closes all menus before making checks.

• Fixed a bug where you couldn't pause without increasing the game speed first.

• Corrected products that didn't fit in their respective boxes.

Balancing

• Increased staff sales efficiency.

• Decreased game attempts by 1 when inviting customers inside.

AI

• Your staff only go to the nearby location when idling.

• Increased navigation zone to support bigger stores. 

• Adjusted all AI to move with the new system.

• Overhauled the courier delivery method.

• Customers now prefer to look at the product in the room they are in, to avoid running back and forth.

• Increased navigation resolution.

Products

• Face Cleansers

• Sunscreen

• Body Lotion

• Self-Tan

• Scrub

• Deodorant

What’s Next

You’ve risen to the top, yes, but what’s next for King of Retail 2?

Let’s take another look at our roadmap. 

Next on the agenda, we have HQ Expansion & Multi Stores, and that’s where my attention will be. The goal is to let you centralise your retail operation, running multiple stores simultaneously, promoting floor managers, and becoming the true CEO you were born to be. 

This will be a sizable undertaking, of course, so I’m planning to roll it out through smaller, more frequent updates, as the elements will connect quite seamlessly over time, which will be great for getting new content into your hands more quickly.

For other notes, don’t forget to swing by the King of Retail 2 Official Discord, where you’ll be the first to see in-progress updates; I’m frequently hanging out in there, too, and will aim to answer your questions when I catch them.

Plus, on Friday, I do a devstream over at my Twitch Channel, where you can watch me working on updates. I tend to answer questions there, too, so swing by on a Friday and let’s chat.

With all that being said, I’ll leave you to jump into the Rise to the Top update! 

Keep the feedback coming, let me know how you’re feeling about this one, and until next time…

Have a great sale.

• Daniel

Dear Retailers,

It’s time to Rise to the Top, as our first major milestone update nears completion!

At the start of this month, I gave some news of a major update coming around the corner. In truth, this is part of an update that kicked August off. But now that we’re putting the final touches on it, I can proudly announce that our first major milestone: the “Rise to the Top” update, will now be available on Thursday, August 28th!

Rise to the Top is an update focused on taking stores to the next level, quite literally but also figuratively – with huge changes to the way stores are built and designed. Now, second floors and beyond are available to entrepreneurs, alongside smarter customers to make use of them.

ENTRANCES, EXITS & ACCESS CONTROL

The logic behind each customer’s behaviour is quite complicated, and the ideal state we want with customer behaviour is to, well, behave like customers. Walking around stores and through entranceways should feel natural and normal.

That being said, a lot of players have asked for features like a back entrance for deliveries, or to add an entrance/exit set of doors to create a highly visible and directed flow of traffic. As part of the Rise to the Top Update, you can now add designations to doorways, allowing to serve as Entrance Only, Exit Only, Both, or Courier Only. 

Access Control Toggle | In-Development

ELEVATION

noun

Dear retailers! Is is time to give an update to King of Retail 2.

--- The past month ---

--- Dev streams ---

Follow the link here:

--- What we have been doing ---

- Entrances

- Chunk system, and no limit walls

{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/44799837/de7d6cb21878b109e302b876d017476bb7fb0a3e.jpg

- Elevators

- Ceiling painter

- Music

- New products

- Chinese

--- And after ---

- Stairs and escalators?

- Final implementations

- Starting multistore

--- Community ---

- Contest

- Other cool pictures

Dear retailers,

Now that summer has arrived, as promised, I’ve got a new update for King of Retail 2 that is playable right now! We’ve got the build mode overhauls, new product lines, destruction of the radial wheel, and other much sought-after tweaks and improvements.

So let’s dive right in.

BUILD MOVE OVERHAUL, PART 1

Build Mode is seeing a large overhaul in this update, and it will serve as just the first part of the major changes I have planned for the mode at this time.

The way you design your building has fundamentally changed. Originally, you would use the Outer Structures segment of the Radial Menu (more on this later) to build the shell of your store. Although this would do the job, I wanted to expand this much further, switching from simply building walls to building Area Blocks.

Area Blocks now form the basis of a unit of “store,” with their own walls tweaked individually. This means that it’s a lot easier to plot out your store and create both outer and internal walls for the layout. No more worrying about creating loops with your wall setup. So, for all of those who’ve been begging for their own Storage Rooms: you’re all set!

The UI in Build Mode has also been overhauled, stripping out the Radial Menu entirely in favour of the Toolbar at the top.

You can also now create multiple floors within your stores, however, I do want to stress that these floors won’t be fully functional yet. That's part 2 of the Build Mode update, where you will be able to operate beyond the ground level; I split this update into multiple chunks as delivering it all in one go would be quite risky due to how it will interact with many other elements of the game. 

I’ll continue working away on this and will keep you posted as things progress. 

As this overhaul to Build Mode is so substantial, it will make its way to the demo in the near future!

RADIAL MENU REMOVAL

We’ve also taken in lots of feedback from players across the Steam discussion forums and in our Discord regarding the Radial Menu. Generally, the feedback was that the Radial Menu added a lot of unnecessary menu management to the game, burying your essentials behind a menu that you needed to open and close frequently, and sometimes leaving players confused on how an interactable could be interacted with.

So I obliterated it, in favour of the new Overlap Menu and updated Toolbars!

The Overlap Menu will now appear above any interactable that you’re within range of, as shown above. This way, you’ll be able to find and click directly on the action you want to take, without needing to open any additional menus. 

Want to restock a shelf? Do so in a single click.

Looking to land a hard sell on a customer? No problem!

Is that display in the wrong place? Not anymore. 

I think this new menu system massively streamlines the UI and how you interact with King of Retail 2, both when in your store, and when crafting perfection in Build Mode. 

Also, as with Build Mode, the new, wheel-less UI will also be present in the demo later down the line.

INTRODUCING: SLIPPERS AND BEAUTY

Two new product ranges have arrived in update 0.2.0.0. 

First up, we’ve got the Slippers range, serving as a broader extension of the footwear category that will continue to see expansion as development continues. With Summer now in full swing, I thought there was no better time to introduce some comfy footwear for your customers to take on their trips to the beach.

And there’s more! You want your customers to be stylish, of course, but you’ll also want them to be able to focus on their health and beautification. Introducing; a brand new article type with Health & Beauty products! This range includes a variety of beauty-related products to further kit out your stores and expand your repertoire. You can expect hand creams, face creams, soaps, shampoos, and much more.

With those highlights in place, here’s what the entirety of update 0.2.0.0 has in-store!

MAJOR

• Completely removed the Radial Menu.

• Added a new Overlap Menu that shows up as soon as you approach any interactable, majorly reducing the number of required clicks, and streamlining the overall UI experience.

• Reworked build mode to let you define your Store by adding area blocks, as opposed to just walls.

• Remaining features previously tied to the Radial Wheel have been moved to the toolbar at the top of the HUD.

• You can now add and remove floors inside each area block.

• You can now add and remove walls inside each area block, creating internal rooms.

• Reduced/removed the blue bar from the bottom side menus.

• Replaced the build mode camera with a full "free move" camera.

• Replaced display designer mode camera with a "free move" camera.

MINOR

• Pressing ‘E’ while overlapping an interactable now activates its primary menu.

• Added conversions of old save games to the new building setup.

• The camera moves up and down with floor level changes.

• Increased the maximum camera offset in build mode.

• Reduced max camera zoom distance in build mode.

• Updated the building rules to fit the new system.

• Updated the default building to fit the new system.

• Doors can now be placed in walls above ground level.

• Removed Open Radial Menu from keybinds.

• Separated product and general decorations into two categories.

• Removed defunct product selection filters.

• Replaced category names with icons in the product finder.

• Added a Z-axis clamp to camera movement.

• Reworked the Place Inventory movement screen.

• Added movement tips to build mode.

• Added a color icon to the Cash Register overlap menu to show the state of a Cash Register.

• Adjusted the tooltip menu.

• Updated the main menu to have information on the latest update.

• Added movement info to the Display Designer.

• All cash registers close automatically after each day.

• Added a marker for an out-of-place decoration.

• Added a filter and visual cue showing the state of a cash register.

BUGS

• You can no longer see under the level.

• Decorations now show their proper location state when clicked on.

• In-store music is now also based on the general music volume.

BALANCING

• Increased overall refilling efficiency.

• Decreased the display refill timer lockout.

CONTENT

• Added slippers!

• Added more custom displays.

• Added a brand new Beauty category featuring face creams.  

• Added 2 clothed mannequins as decorations. 

And there we have it!

Jump into the game, let me know how you’re feeling about this update, and please keep the feedback coming! A bunch of changes made in this update are in response to player feedback, so thank you to everyone who’s made their voices heard thus far. Your comments are much appreciated.

Have a wonderful rest of your day, and until next time…

Happy selling!

• Daniel 

Hello, dear retailers!

I wanted to share a blog with you today regarding an approaching update for King of Retail 2, dropping in less than 2 weeks. Just so you can get an overview of what’s coming down the pipe soon, as well as the updates that will follow. 

I aim to deliver one of these developer blogs every 2 weeks, so without further ado, let’s jump right in.

Build Mode

In development image of the new build environment, now with internal walls.

One of the key priorities of mine over the last couple of weeks has been additions and updates to Build Mode. It’s been wonderful to see so many of you leverage Build Mode to express your retail creativity, and, with these planned updates, there are plenty more enhancements to come.

Three big requests I’ve seen regarding Build Mode are the ability to build internal walls with the structure tool, as opposed to having to use the Shapes tool to build your own, the functionality to create multiple levels/floors in your stores, and the problems with the radial wheel. 

I’m pleased to confirm that these updates are coming very soon. First up, internal walls will be buildable in the next update, letting you divide your shop floor much more easily than before! This system is much simpler, much faster, and much requested by players, so I’m excited for you to get your hands on it.

The next addition, multi-level builds, will take a bit more time. In the new update, you’ll be able to build these additional floors, but your in-store experience will remain limited to the ground floor for the time being. 

This is quite a substantial change to Build Mode itself, and I didn’t want to push it through for the imminent update without being able to safely do so, as it will require tweaks to the AI and inventory placement before it can be fully active. 

Instead, I will be rolling this out more gradually, meaning I can also release smaller updates more regularly, rather than bundling everything into one big update and leaving you update-less for a long period of time.  

Either way, I will keep you posted as Build Mode continues to expand.

UI Overhaul; or, The Death of the Radial Wheel 

Another big change, and this is a big UI thing, is the phasing out of the radial wheel. 

The radial wheel is used for many things in King of Retail 2, but after hearing your feedback and concerns with the system, I’m starting to purge the radial wheel from the game, in favour of utilising the toolbar at the top of the screen.

Meaning, all of your tools, such as Outer Structures, Colourisation, Decorations, and much more, will be clickable from the main HUD. This also leads to context menus that pop up when you’re able to interact with something, so it more clearly demonstrates what your options are without needing to open that cursed wheel.

In-store HUD

Build Mode HUD

That way, you can spend less time clicking through menus and more time building and managing the store of your dreams.

Once this drops, please let me know how you feel about this UI change, as well as any other menus you feel could do with some TLC.

New Products!

Expanding the King of Retail 2 article catalogue further, slippers have found their way into the next update!

Also, in the Week 1 update, I mentioned the addition of the Health & Beauty article line, and this is coming along very nicely. There are lots of skin care products on the way alongside more articles you’d expect to find in your local cosmetics store, or the Health aisle of a mighty supermarket. These will also be arriving in the next update.

Oh, and speaking of supermarkets…

Supermarket Contest

As mentioned in the previous Steam blog, we’re running a contest for you to submit your Supermarket in the official King of Retail 2 Discord with a shot at winning one of 3 prizes.

There’s still one week left to get your supermarket screenshot submissions in, so make sure to head over to the King of Retail 2 Discord, follow the contest submission guidelines, and potentially snag yourself a gift card. 

That’s all for now. So, to conclude this dev blog, I’ll leave you with some extremely cool player-created shops that I’ve seen shared around so far. 

Credits in order:

Changes in 0.1.0.3

Minor

Bugs

Onto the Update

• We’ve added many, many new decorations! As an example, every product currently within King of Retail 2 can now be used as a decorative prop. You can scale up those baguettes, slap jars of pickles across every wall, if you wish, and let your creativity run wild as you craft the perfect store.

• All items now show their Bulk Count to reduce confusion when ordering.
• Reduced the space needed for new registers.
• Men’s boots and Men’s classical shoes have arrived in King of Retail 2.

• Added 2 new door types in Build Mode.
• HQ rooms are now properly removed in save games if deleted from HQ.
• Couriers now spawn in the same place as customers,
• Individual applications can now be removed.
• Adjusted the collision zone of new registers to prevent AI blocking.
• Walls will now properly save their rotation direction.
• Products now respect register mirroring when purchased.
• The Article viewer now closes upon clicking the X button.
• Pants properly show their Bulk Count when ordering.

Looking Forward

Supermarket Building Contest

• Added difficulty options to King of Retail 2 upon creating a new game.

• Added V-sync Options to the Graphics Menu
• Added Motion Blur options to the Graphics Menu
• Added Bloom Options to the Graphics Menu
• Main menu buttons now toggle off properly.
• The Article Details panel now properly updates the relevant graphs.