Building & Managing your Mall
When the game starts you are presented with a landscape and in the centre is a large area which is the plot that you are allowed to build on. The car park, footbridge, railway station and bus station are situated around your building site, so keep this in mind when building your mall.

The building of the mall is done by simply laying down areas of floor and walls, then filling these with stores and objects to design the best mall you can. When building your mall always try to have everything contained within a walled area, otherwise you will end up with isolated stores and areas that shoppers will not be able to reach.

Placement of entrances is also important when building your mall because without these shoppers will not be able to enter your mall. If you have badly placed entrances they will have trouble finding their way in.

When adding extra floors to your mall always try to keep in mind how shoppers are going to reach this new level. Well placed stairs, escalators and elevators are essential for your mall to be successful. Also there needs to be something on the new floor to attract shoppers. For example a big empty floor with three hardware stores isn't going to attract a broad range of shoppers.

You can move around the 3D world using the mouse. Move the onscreen cursor to the edge of the screen and the view will start to scroll. Move it away from the edge and scrolling will stop.

To rotate the view, hold down the mouse wheel or middle mouse button and move the mouse. The view will rotate with the mouse movement. To zoom in and out, roll the mouse wheel.

If your mouse does not have a scroll wheel, or you prefer to use keys then the following key can be used instead.

W or Cursor Up scroll view up.
S or Cursor Down scroll view down.
A or Cursor Left scroll view left.
D or Cursor Right scroll view right.

Ctrl hold down and press W, S, A or D or move the mouse to rotate the view.
Shift hold down and press W or S or move the mouse forwards and backwards to zoom in and out. There are several other extra keys that can be used to control the game.

Q zoom view in.
E zoom view out.
Delete activate demolish mode.
< rotate an object or shop 90 degrees anticlockwise, if no item selected this key will rotate the camera view.
> rotate an object or shop 90 degrees clockwise, if no item selected this key will rotate the camera view.

C switch to and from 1st person shopper/staff view.

Almost all functions in the game are accessible via two interface panels. The main building panel (situated in the top left corner of the screen) and the smaller navigation panel (situated in the bottom left corner of the screen).
Navigation Panel
The navigation panel appears in the bottom left corner of the screen. The centre of the panel shows your current funds. The rest of the panel is used to navigate around and build your mall.

Delete - The bulldozer is used to delete or demolish items within the mall. Left click on the button and your cursor will then be in demolishing mode. Any square you move the cursor over will be highlighted yellow, if you left click on it, the floor, wall, store or object that is on that square will then be deleted.

 


Note that certain floor blocks may not be deleted due to the structure of the mall; the delete cursor will highlight them in pink rather than yellow and will not allow you to delete them.

Rotate - These arrows are used to rotate an object, unit or special that you are currently in the process of placing. If you have no object selected, then they will rotate your 3D view. It is also possible to rotate and object using the '<' and '>' keys on the keyboard.
Message - This is used to bring up a message window that will show you a list of previous messages that have appeared.
Floors - These arrows allow you to move up and down through your mall's floors. The number in the centre shows the mall floor you are currently building on. If you try to go up to a floor which doesn't exist, you will be asked if you wish to add a new floor to your mall. Say yes and a new floor will be added.
This strip of buttons is used to determine the flow of time in the game, starting with pause on the left, followed by three different game speeds, each one making the game run at a faster speed.

These functions are useful when building and managing your mall. When you are building you will probably want time to pass slowly. Once you have built your basic mall you may wish to speed up time to allow more people to flow through and increase your income.

From time to time a message bar will pop out from the bottom of the screen. This will usually be information on how well your mall is performing or other related information.

When you open the Management sub menu, a small info bar showing the current date will appear to the right of the navigation panel.

When you select an item to build such as an object, store etc., a small info bar showing the cost of the item will appear to the right of the navigation panel.
Main Interface Panel
This panel contains access to almost all the functions in the game. Using a dynamic pop up system, the menu item you are looking for is never more than three clicks away.

The initial panel will appear in its minimised state, with only three buttons available, Build, Management and Options. Clicking on any of the three buttons with the left mouse button will open up a sub menu which contains the next level of buttons. Clicking the same button again will collapse the interface back down to its minimised state.