release

ludum dare

space transport tycoon

steam

the periodic group

periodic deliveries

Way back in Ludum Dare 30 Justin Britch and I made a game called Space Transport Tycoon (which you can still play in your browser for free. Four years later, we still remember it fondly as the the game we spent the most time actually playing after making it. This year, we finally resurrected it as Periodic Deliveries and we're publishing it on December 17th on Steam!

Check out this before-and-after:

We've obviously upgraded the visual quality, thanks to our real artist, John Lewis. The game still features the same core mechanic - configuring trade routes between planets to move certain goods from where they're produced to where they're needed - but we changed several peripheral mechanics. In the game jam, I wanted to create a game with multiple views shown simultaneously. That's how we got the planetary view at the bottom-right, where you could relocate factories to tiles that had more optimal conditions, based on the type of factory. This ended up being one of those features that had a lot of cool stuff in the implementation but didn't work in practice - it was just a quick chore to do once on each new planet. We removed it to focus on the main view.

One small change had a big impact: we prohibited trade routes from crossing each other. In Space Transport Tycoon, you'd often build a crisscrossing web of routes that wasn't terribly satisfying. The new restriction requires the player to use certain planets as hubs and create arterial intermediate routes, which we think is an important and cool part of the shipping fantasy.

The UI also got a big rework. The old UI was "planet-centric" - that is, you selected a trade route and were presented with a list of every planet on that route, with controls to configure the behavior at each planet. This allows the player to picture everything that happens at a particular planet little more easily, but it requires extra mental steps to think about what happens to a particular good across the entire route - the later being much more useful to the player than the former. The list can also get arbitrarily long, which is kind of a UI nightmare. Periodic Deliveries now uses a goods-centric UI, where the player sees a list of goods that are involved with the route, and configures which planets import or export that good.

That's just a few of the larger changes we made for Periodic Deliveries. If it sounds like something you'd like, try out Space Transport Tycoon right now and wishlist Periodic Deliveries below!

This post has been updated: the explanation of planet-centric vs. goods-centric UI was backwards.