This week, Michi has been implementing the new ship information feature, Julian is redesigning the company website, and Martin has completed all that is needed for the formation of Corporations.

Martin

Hello! I’m back! The things they tell you about parenthood are (mostly) true: You’re constantly tired and you feel like you don’t get around to anything anymore. But for some biologically encoded reason, you don’t care.

Anyway… a great thing about simulogics these days is that there are quite a few people that continue doing things while I’m gone, so it took me a while to catch up when I got back into the office last week and I spent a whole lot of time in meetings and calls - not only concerning Prosperous Universe. That’s not to say these calls weren’t useful: Some of them dealt with pretty cool game design topics that we’re tackling for the next alpha and I’m pretty stoked about getting to work on them!

Meetings aside, I actually managed to work on the game and it felt incredibly good to also dive back into code. By “code” I mean actual code of the game… not some infrastructure or management project. In fact, I finally managed to complete the server-side implementation of corporation formation. So I’m hopeful to finally wrap this feature up some time over the coming weeks!

Michi (molp)

This week I continued to work on the list of smaller tasks to make the game more interactive. For example, I added a ship information tile that is opened when clicking on a ship that is not one of your own:

The tile provides some basic information about the ship and its owner but not much more yet. We have a few ideas what could be interesting for the players to see here, but we will add the information gradually when the corresponding features are implemented. For example, the dimensions and weight of the ships could be interesting, as is the ship type and class. Of course we cannot simply show what another player has stored in the cargo bay, but maybe there will be a feature to allow that in the future.

What would you like to have added in this tile if you could make a wish?

Besides the ship information tile, I also worked on the more technical subject of monitoring the game world. I finished a framework to collect and display metrics and as a test added a statistic for daily, weekly and monthly active players. I am going to show some screenshots eventually, but right now there is not much to see yet.

Julian (Mjeno)

Most of my work time this week went into our company website’s overhaul. I started by throwing away last week’s first attempt at a redesign and got cracking with a completely different template as a new starting point. I can’t show you anything yet, but we’re nearing the finish line and will probably reveal the new design in a couple of days. Besides that, I conducted two more player interviews this week, applied for some prizes and events, engaged in local games industry politics, and took care of a long overdue clean-up of our company’s shared files. Not every day in game dev is exciting, okay? ;)

As always: we’d love to hear what you think: join us on the forums!

Happy trading!