Development Log Week 53

What better way is there to get over Trump becoming the president of the world's most powerful nation than to lock ourselves into a dark room and work on a game for 5 days straight? Exactly...there isn't one! So that's what we did this week.

We needed to get some conceptual stuff off the table and it really helps to be in the same room for that. We've been working on the technical implementation of Prosperous Universe for over a year now, but so far, we've somewhat neglected the actual content of the game. In case of PU, this primarily refers to the products that players can produce and that the in-game populations consume. The resulting material tree has to fulfill several purposes: First and foremost we want it to force players to cooperate. Therefore it must be more or less impossible for a single player to produce every product in the game or even a considerable chunk of them. At the same time we don't want players to get stuck in an endless grind of producing low-value materials. Last but not least, we want our products to sound plausible. In our universe, there's no place for (too much) technobabble. We designed a large part of that tree this week although many weeks of tuning are still ahead of us to make sure production times and ratios feel right.

Beyond that we spent about a day working on the formulas and rules for how our game world is generated. Since the game world will be more or less set in stone once the game actually launches, we want to make sure it is as diverse and plausible as possible beforehand. On a lower level, this includes how different types of planets are generated. On higher levels, it covers how the universe as a whole is laid out.

The remaining time was used for some scheming and planning. The good news: We know exactly what we have to do. The bad news: It will take months to complete! But that's game-dev life. See you next week!