It has been one year since we initially started working on King of Tapes on Aug 1 2020!

Let's take a quick look at where we started from, where we are now, and where the game is going.

Progress from then to now

The development speed has been a bit... varying. But this is expected given neither of us is working on the game full time. Despite this, I think we've made some decent progress.

The original release of the game looked like this:

In this original release, you were locked inside the store floor, and whenever the day ended, it would directly skip into the next morning.

Since then, we have released four private alpha releases of the game. You are also no longer stuck in the store, and can move between the back of the store and even some exterior parts in the world

King of Tapes v 0.0.4.0

The overall look of the game is much better now, and we've added a number of large gameplay updates as well. The current private tester release is at version 0.0.4.0.

The biggest update by far is being able to build your own fully custom store. You can place and paint walls, doors, shelves, counter, place items, etc.

Of course if you actually put in some effort, you can make your store look nicer than this lame attempt I made in a few minutes. But my excuse is I needed this just for testing purposes so it's fine!

We put in a lot of work to make the store building work well, and we added new functionality so you can place items where you want them easily. In a lot of games this can be a pain, but I think our system for this works well.

We also are working on adding places you can visit around town. This is heavily work in progress right now, but here's a quick screenshot - everything you see are temporary development placeholders and will change later.

You can also read about some of the previous updates in our february 2021 devlog

The future of King of Tapes

We've still got a lot of work ahead of us before we can call this game anywhere near complete. Updates to the store, building systems, AI, adding locations in town, new tasks... I could go on and on.

Our current focus is giving the player a good sense of progression. You start from the basics, and work to get customers for your store. You then improve your store to increase customer satisfaction, gain additional things to do, and so on.

The ultimate goal is to get this game on Steam. We want the game to be in fairly good shape before that, so there's still quite a long way to go. If you want to support us, please check out our website at KINGofTAPES.com. In addition to our email list, we recently made our Discord server public and created a Twitter account, which you can find on the website.