Honcho Game

Hi all, Just a heads-up that development on Honcho will be slower than usual while we relocate the studio. As this is an international move, it will take a few weeks for us to get settled before the project can get back up to full speed. Without access to funding, and still being months away from a

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0.55 should now be available to download for all Patreon subscribers. Change List 0.55 Performance Road damage optimisations Removed GPU instancing from road damage Road damage no longer transparent, instead it is an opaque cutout Reverted Tree line shader change Fixed Petrol Station attendant missi

0.54 should now be available to download for all Patreon subscribers. Quick hot fix to reduce the GPU load shadows are having on the game. I pushed them too hard during a hardware crisis. I apologise to your GPUs. Performance Reduced strain of shadows on the GPU Fixes Fixed Blinking animation gettin

0.5 is now available to download from the itch.io link provided to all Patreon subscribers. Details and change list below. Features Prosperity Vending Machines are finally providing an impact beyond mild economic benefit. A core theme I'm interested in exploring with Honcho is that capitalism can be

Good for the seller. Good for the buyer. Good for society. Prosperity is coming to Honcho, but why? Here's a quick look at not only the mechanical justification for this feature, but why thematically, it's important to the game. For this, we'll explore the old Japanese idea of 三方よし (Sanpō-yoshi). "G

Quick patch to fix the issue with being unable to pickup crates. Change List 0.48 Fixed Automatic gear boxes struggling to change gear on engines with RPM and Torque unique attribute enhancements Automatic gear box gear change up RPM requirement lowered by 12.5% Fixed not being able to select engine

Change List 0.47 Fixes Fixed players being able to unsecure Honcho vending spots, which would break the ability to purchase them later on., Fixed load issue caused by air filters with more intakes than the engine they're attached to Fixed save data not referencing the Storage Cabinet correctly when

Latest fixes are out on Itch. Thanks for playing and reporting! Change List 0.45 Fixes Fixed Kusahiro brakes spawning rotated incorrectly on Batako trucks Fixed Job Complete UI not showing delivery good weights correctly Fixed Inaka_Building_03 having a gap in the roof cladding Fixed adjusting mouse

0.4 is now Available to all Patreon subscribers. In this update, Honcho see's the introduction of Property Purchasing with all new home garages providing truck storage, narrative elements, new jobs, new upgrades and out of town locations. There's also some new truck components to hunt down, includin

Tyres have been rebuilt for the upcoming 0.4 update. Let's go over what's changing. Fuji Rubber Co. Fuji Rubber Company is the components market found within the Yamanashi prefecture. Fuji Rubber Company is a market that specializes in tyre sales. Providing an unlimited stock of all sorts of tyres,

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Storage Cabinets are the newest garage upgrade heading to 0.4. This garage upgrade allows players to clean up their cluttered workspace and store Truck Components, Repair Parts, Trade Goods, Spray Paints and Vending Machines. Once this upgrade has been purchased and installed, the Storage Cabinet is

Hello all. I'm currently on a content push to get Property Purchasing into Honcho. Here's how that will work. Overview Purchasing property provides the following benefits. Save Point Players who save in a town with a property they own will load back into that town Narrative Each property contains se

Hello everybody. This was another week focused mainly on fixes and improvements, though I have also re-added spray paint to the game. You can buy them from the stock auto parts dealerships. With this update, the game should be in a stable enough spot for me to work towards the 0.4 update. In 0.4, I'

Hello all, 0.35 is now available to download for Patreon subscribers. This update contains mostly quality of life changes, bug fixes and AI tweaking. A massive thank you to the community's help on finding these issues, making it quick and easy for me to fix. Change list below: Changes Ryujin beer is

The long awaited v0.3 build for Honcho is finally available. You can access the build through the itch app, or the usual link here. Change list below. Full World Vending Simulation Vending machines have had a huge rework. They now simulate damage and rust. Vending machines now need to be repaired an

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The vendors in game will finally have their placeholder NPCs replaced with actual characters. I've always viewed those placeholders as the characters in my head, but I'm excited to finally have my interpretation of those actually in the game for you. I still need to model the NPC customers, but I th

Apologies my end on how long this update is taking, there are big overhauls to the tycoon systems in the game along with a lot of polish and art replacements. These things, they take time. Meet your Rival In 0.3, I'll be adding a corporate rival to the game, the Hanchō Corporation. Previous referenc

Yesterday I created a post about Mr Tofu, who is an avatar stand-in for players who'd prefer not to play as Keiko. It went viral, a first for anything I've worked on, so I was keen to understand the significance of this as a developer. The post read: Steam community: "Can we play as a male character

Whilst the majority of the last week was spent finishing up the new debt tracking system and polishing up the Auto Dealer feature, time has been spent on calibrating the game to work better with the more impoverished player start. Auto-Parts Shop Changes Wadashima and Mizunuma now host a Batako auto

I've just finished added Auto Dealers to the internal build, these will be coming to the 0.3 release over on itch to Patreon subscribers, no date for this yet. The Auto Dealers allow players to purchase second-hand kei trucks. Players can take on loans to purchase these trucks, and even sell their o

I've added a new page to the office UI called Classifieds. This page displays a collection of classified advertisements allowing the player to purchase upgrades and other goodies. Read on to see how you can get a bit of yourself in the game. Why I'm Adding this? Whilst Honcho is about driving and up

I mentioned previously that the financials screen UI hadn't been moved over to the new system yet. Part of the reason for that was that I didn't know how best to handle it. During the Christmas break, I had enough mental space to resolve how I'd like to implement it. Towards the end of the year, I w

0.23 is now available to download through the usual location over on itch. The focus here was to get Vending Machines working before the Christmas break. So there are a bunch of fixes tied to that and other areas. I've also added in an Engine Hoist to allow working on the engine outside the vehicle.

0.2 Update should now be available to Patreon subscribers through the usual https://minskworks.itch.io/patreon-access-for-honcho link. The focus of this update was to finally transition over to the free-roam design I'd been targeting. I've reworked a lot of core systems here to allow driving between

I've had Keiko do a lot of driving this week, hoping to ensure build stability for the December update. As she's been racking up the kilometres, I started to feel sorry for how tired she kept looking. Keiko can now travel quite far from her home, making getting a good night's sleep difficult. She's

Behold, a scuffed recording of me installing and filling a vending machine. Sharing this raw footage immediately helps me realise what needs more polish. Market needs an ambient soundscape, door opening of the vending machine needs hand animations, the seats on the Batako truck need to not clip thro

I wanted to share the work I've been doing on the world economy and markets, but it's just not ready yet, so have a showcase of the new front-end to tide you over. Market Changes Makets are now affected by the world economy, with prices being adjusted by world events. Working on this has been slower

No, this isn't an NFT or the next evolution of the Internet of Things, keep your draws on. This week I've been looking at pushing forward the world economic systems in Honcho. Economic Events Though the current demo's game loop focuses on delivery jobs and truck maintenance, Honcho's core gameplay l

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One of the features of Jalopy that I feel often gets overlooked is the licence plate generation. Licence plates in Jalopy were generated uniquely for each player. Each vehicle registration generated in Jalopy abided by the format set out by the German Democractic Republic. Honcho will feature a simi

This week I focused on improving the front end players are met with when opening the game. Reworking the UI to feel more polished, visually appealing, and (the word we all love) more diegetic. Forgive the meme format, but I think it does help show the improvements. The original design was very flat,

As you’ve probably noticed, the demo hasn’t had an update for a while. That’s because I’ve been busy working on World Traversal. World Traversal is the ability for players to freely travel between prefectures, which also lays the groundwork for the world economy. New World Map After going over the p

After pestering publishers last week, we received a firm no from one. Though it's a shame to get a rejection, the publisher in question is very selective with who they sign and in the current climate it's understandable. They did, however, take the time to explain their reasoning, which we're extrem

Work on Honcho is currently focused on getting the screwdriver fully implemented into the game. To achieve this, we need to add functionality for all components installed with the screwdriver, which includes Headlights and Indicators. Headlights and indicators now function like other components on t

Batako; All New Trucks Originally, with the modular, "Ship of Theseus" design of the Dazio T360 truck, I'd not expected a demand for additional trucks. This demand has been vocal enough that I've reconsidered and decided to expand the scope of the game, adding additional trucks for players to purcha

A new demo version has been uploaded to the usual location on Itch. Lot's of good changes including ladders, new animation and pushing! Details below: 0.15 Demo Change List Various improvements have been made to Keiko's Push action Pushing the truck should now consistently & correctly push the truck

Somewhere in rural Japan... closed access to the Honcho demo is available! Thank you all for your patience with this. The demo is now available for all paid Patreons. Here’s how it works: If you’ve ever pledged at the Support Honcho tier ($10 or more), you should receive a link to access the build o

Unity 6 Finally got around to upgrading to the new Unity LTS of Unity 6. LTS (Long-Term Support) provides developers with the best stability and support for their projects. Unity 6 also provides the benefit of being able to replace the Unity splash screen with our own Minskworks splash screen. Upgra

As I work on adding controller support into the game (more on that later), I wanted to keep you in the loop with some continued improvements to the vehicle mechanics. This time, I've gone through and improved the transmission. The AK250E engine comes paired with a bulky 4-speed transmission. This is

Forgive me for I have sinned. I've added a new engine to break up the dull but important tasks required to hit demo. Now this silly idea has been excersied, I will return to controller support and gameplay related tasks. 389cc GX390 1C OHV The 389cc GX390 1C OHV has the following base stats*: Base H

The repair bench needed new art as it looked pretty rough. While working on that I began to worry that players wouldn't understand what it does or even if it's usable. Rather than add in a tool tip that players won't read, I settled on a visual callout that should hopefully attract the players' eye.

Last week saw significant refactoring in how we handle loot spawning in the game. In Jalopy, loot consisted of engine parts found in abandoned cars and trade goods that spawned in boxes along the roadside. The system was very basic and relied entirely on random generation. This "full random" approac