Features

Awards

The idol group award ceremony happens once a year, with a variety of award categories that you can qualify for (and potentially win), including awards for groups (like "best single" and "most prolific group") and individual idols (like "fashion icon" and "best debut idol").

Winning awards gives recognition that provides tangible benefits to your agency: each award category provides a different buff that lasts for one year until the next annual award show. As they say, it's an honor just to be nominated, and even if you don't win the award, simply reaching the eligibility requirements to be nominated for a category will you a reduced form of the buff that you'd get for winning.

On the awards menu (which can be accessed from the main agency view), you can view the eligibility requirements for each category, and see how close you are to reaching the requirements. You may even be able to see what it would take to win the category, if you've been nominated for the award enough times (or won the award) in previous years.

While awards (and nominations) have benefits that last all year, it wouldn't be an awards show without pomp and ceremony: getting to appear on stage at an award show is a great honor, and when it comes to accepting group awards, it's up to you to decide who will enjoy that honor.

Any idol who receives an award (either due to winning a solo award, or being chosen to accept an award on behalf of the group) has the opportunity to thank someone in their speech. Idols will follow your instructions on who to thank if you think someone in particular deserves to be thanked in their speech: maybe you need them to thank a sponsor who has decided they want to be recognized, or maybe you want to hear your own name and get the recognition  and respect that you personally deserve as a manager. Idols who thank another idol during their acceptance speech will see their relationship with that idol improve, and staffers who are mentioned during an acceptance speech will get a boost to their performance. Of course, idols will appreciate it more if you give them the freedom to write their own acceptance speech.

Improvements

Visual updates

• Added 11 new hairstyles and 3 accessories
• Updated the sprite of the polka dot idol

Changes to singles

• Trendy genres, lyrics themes and choreography styles no longer increase appeal. Instead, you get additional casual or hardcore fans based on how trendy or obscure the single's style is.
• Singles now earn more fame points based on the fame of participating idols.  It now makes more sense to give good spots in the formation to fresh idols to quickly boost their fame.
• Tooltip for released singles lists idols in formation
• Idols' profiles now list all singles this idol participated in

Misc changes:

• Simulation of rival groups is now more complex. Rival groups will rise and fall in the charts over time, old groups can disband and new groups can appear.
• Business proposals now affect graduations (idols like getting jobs and hate not getting jobs)
• Idols often graduated from the group after finishing high school. This happens less often now, and you can find out if your idol is going to leave the group for this reason and persuade her to stay.
• You now need at least one idol, one stylist and one dressing room to unlock styling.
• You can now check your credit history in the loans popup and pay off your loans early.
• You can now type in idol's salary to select an exact number instead of using +/- buttons
• Business proposal popup now shows how much stamina the idols have (no need to hover over them anymore)
• Idols that don't do "sexy" business proposals get increasingly better "sexy" proposals
• Idols won't auto train style parameters that have hit the age stat cap
• Concerts change: Accident chance can't be lower than 10% (before using a card)

Modding changes

Editor:

• Various quality-of-life improvements
• Added checks for number of idols and number of released singles
• You can now use the "OR" operator (checks and returns positive if at least one condition was met)
• You can now add requirements to Choice nodes
• Use Meta -> Quit to quit the dialogue early
• Use Meta -> Continue to continue the previous text instead of clearing the text box
• You can add (or subtract) to variables: Meta -> Variable Math -> variable_name + 2 and then check Meta -> Variable -> variable_name > 1
• You can set custom position, rotation and scale of sprites. "Default Position" cancels changes
• You can tell the game to ignore certain accessories when generating idols (they will still be available for custom styling), add "ignore_accs": [0, 2, 3… etc] in params.json

Localization changes:

• Customizable fonts. You can set the name of the font in info.json. The font must be installed on the player's computer, otherwise the default one will be used.
• Vars.json: you can now set colors of variables to blue|red|green. (Will be white if color is unspecified)

Bug fixes

• Fixed: Idols incorrectly reporting that they're not interested in men/women when player tries to flirt with them
• Fixed: The Chernobyl bug 
• Fixed: Idols having different portraits after audition
• Fixed: Getting stuck on blurred screen after launching audition
• Fixed: Sales chart showing singles from previous years
• Fixed: Pressing spacebar or enter could trigger clicks on UI buttons
• Fixed: Idols getting stuck in rooms with no staffers
• Fixed: Overflowing fame bars
• Fixed: Styling popup could open with a graduated idol
• Fixed: Idol profile card not updating after styling
• Fixed: Graduated idols still losing mental stamina because of social media policies
• Fixed: Notifications in the bottom right rendering under the scroll bar
• Fixed: Elections didn't actually cost any money
• Modding: Fixed: Only the first sibling Check node was used, the others were skipped

We look forward to seeing your feedback on the latest update in the beta community forum. If you have a feature request or found a bug, post in the forum to let us know!