Development Log Week 11

Martin

After starting the first actual work-week of the year with many hours of brainstorming and planning (see Michi’s update), I delved right into the development of another core feature of the game: The commodity exchange. As the name suggests, a commodity exchange allows trading...well...commodities. You could always do so using contracts, either posted to a bulletin board or directly to a business partner. But with a proper exchange, things become a lot easier and more transparent.

Because we don’t know yet how active some of the markets in the game will become one day, getting the technical setup right is key. Therefore I spent quite a bit of time on the design of the core functions and researched how orders are matched in real-world trading systems. I then went on to work on the interface for the exchanges, trying to achieve a „professional look“ as you’d find it on finance sites in the real world. This isn’t quite done yet and a lot more work will go into proper charts and additional information displays next week.

Michi

The year started with a solid day full of planning budgets, brainstorming and roadmaps. We also spoke about strategies for finding an artist again. We are going to talk to our fellow dev friends in Munich to see if someone knows someone.

On the next day more planning followed, this time it was more about the features we want to implement next and especially those that need to be implemented before I move. We concluded that the planetary production system and trading are the most important ones. For the rest of the week I worked on a component that displays the surface of a planet and shows the structures and cities there. We decided to go with a 3D globe, which looks awesome :)