Carpe Fulgur’s SpaceDrake (also known as Andrew Dice, Founder of Carpe Fulgur) recently put up a post on the Recettear side of their official forums explaining why the dev team has been relatively silent recently, and talked about plans to rectify that situation.

According to Dice, Carpe Fulgur has been busy with both real-life and work-related issues since the release of Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale, and have thus been quiet on the forums. They’ve been working on setting up a second patch to polish the game further, and have also been investigating the crashing issues some people have been having with the game.

Sadly, Dice does mention that there is a possibility that the crashes may have less to do with the game and more with the actual computer that’s playing it, as they’ve been unable to replicate the crash unless they do “daft stuff like uninstall our sound drivers without a replacement or somesuch.” That said, they’re still reporting crashes and DXDiag results to EasyGameStation, the Japanese indie game group that created Recettear.

Perhaps the most intriguing bit of news that came out from the recent forum post is the mention of creating a developer blog to talk about Carpe Fulgur’s activities, with a forum specifically meant to discuss the posts released on the dev blog. With that announcement comes this bit of news that I’ll just quote here:

For the curious, we’ll be able to talk about how Recettear is selling at the end of the month. By then we should have a pretty good idea of just how well we’re doing and how sustainable everything will be. Remember though, word of mouth is our most powerful tool right now, so if you like Recettear, tell your friends and get them to throw money at us!

Remember, dear readers: If you want Carpe Fulgur to come out with more cool stuff, we’re going to have to put Recettear on our shop windows to get people to come into the store and buy the game! So hop to it, and talk about Recettear some more!

Capitalism, ho!

EDIT: Forum Link, as I completely forgot to add it when it was originally posted. Sorry about that.

So I’ve been playing Recettear a lot and have generally noticed that for most people, the game can be a pain in the ass on the first playthrough. Let me alleviate that somewhat (and potentially lengthen the time you spend in your first playthrough) by giving you a tip regarding Recettear’s magic numbers.

I was looking through Carpe Fulgur’s Recettear forums and found this little tips and tricks guide for people to use. Now, I read everything, and it’s basically meant for people trying the demo, but in a nutshell, there’s some really good information on the optimum price you should use to increase the level and budget of your shoppers.

Basically, what you’ll want to do is make sure that you always sell at 104% of base price and buy items from people in your shop at 70% of base price. According to the author of the guide, doing this increases the chances of getting Merchant Level experience bonuses with each sale/purchase (these would be those BONUS and JUST PIN notices on the left side of the screen). Specifically, 95% of the time, they will accept your offer.

What’s so great about this? Well, while you’re selling for lower than Tear advises, this is the most efficient way of accruing Merchant Level experience and increasing the available budget of all your shoppers. With higher levels, you can purchase more expensive items from the market and Merchant Guild and with a higher shopping budget, shoppers are more likely to purchase all the expensive stuff you just bought from the city.

This’ll be useful all the way till you hit Merchant Level 50, which is the final level in which you get a new power from advancing your Merchant Level.

I’m still looking around for ways to make my Recettear gaming experience less of a burden on my math-addled mind, so if you come across interesting links or observations, let me know. And to the folks out in Twitterland who happen to see this, if you could remind me to take screenshots from my gameplay, I’d appreciate it.

Capitalism, ho!