While Michi was finishing up the new fuel usage model, Julian has been busy with the creation of a wiki, the company’s rebranding, and more player interviews.

Michi (molp)

This week, I finished one of the last missing bits of the navigation overhaul: the fuel usage slider!

As you can see in the animation above, you can use the slider to tell the ship controls how much fuel should be spent on the given flight. Of course, the fuel usage selection has been in working condition before and currently is in the alpha, but there have been so many breaking changes in my latest refactorings that it didn’t work anymore.

So what’s the big deal about it? Well, calculating the minimum and maximum fuel that can be spent on a flight is not as trivial as it sounds.

There are various limiting factors, like the fixed amount of fuel necessary to get off a planet’s surface for example. A dynamic factor would be the minimum speed to catch up with your target. If you set the usage too low, the ship won’t ever reach its target!

A limiting factor for the maximum amount of fuel that can be spent is the ship’s specifications. Ships are only rated to a certain amount of g-force during acceleration and deceleration and the engines burn fuel at a constant rate. So if you have only planned a short hop between neighboring planets, the distance between them might be too short to burn all the fuel, since the ship has to turn around in the middle and start decelerating.

Julian (Mjeno)

I mentioned our company’s branding overhaul several times in the past. This week, we revealed our new logo and claim:

The logo design (created by typneun design agency) went through multiple iterations, and we are really happy with how it turned out. The new claim is the result of a long process as well. We’ve been coming up with and throwing away worse alternatives for months, but “Expert games” finally encapsulates what we stand for, describing both our own and our audience’s approach to our games. We intentionally didn’t bring up the simulogics name very often in the past because the company has been a hybrid of web development contractor and indie game development studio. Our branding as a pure game developer now finally makes the switch that happened a long time ago in reality. That is why I’m working on a new company website that is going to go online soon.

I also tackled a completely new task this week: written tutorials! Not only that: Those tuorials are part of a bigger undertaking, a Prosperous Universe wiki. Testers have been asking about written resources in the past in addition to the existing video tutorials. Your wish is my command, as I will have them ready in time for alpha test #6.

Lastly, we continued our series of player interviews this week, which supplied us with more valuable insights into our existing audience’s demographics and preferences. As always: we’d love to hear what you think: join us on the forums!

Happy trading!