Development Log Week 9

Martin

This week I added "bulletin boards" to the game. These are - contrary to their internet equivalent - not designed to be a place for discussion, but a tool to post and find jobs and offers within the game's universe. To fill it with a little bit of life, I also added a rudimentary AI that creates a few simple jobs whenever a new company is founded. This way, a new player can earn some money right after diving into the game without having to be an expert just yet.

Since getting the bulletin board to work required quite a bit of backend programming, I closed the week by brushing up the looks of the interface for the first time, trying to figure out what kind of look we might want to go for in the long term.

All in all, the game is coming together quite nicely and we're surprisingly well on the rough schedule we set ourselves before actual development started.

Michi

This week started off with implementing a radial context menu that shows some buttons when hovering over a star or a planet within a star system. Usually it will show buttons like "show planet/system information", "go to the system" and so on. The actually context sensitive buttons are "show ships", "show storages" and a few others are in planning stages.

To be able to tell where in the game world the player's assets, like ships and storages, are I added two more check boxes in the map controls: one lets you see where the storages are and at what capacity they are and the other shows the stationary ships. So far this only works on the star map. One of the next steps will be to display moving ships as well.