Development Log Week 103

The whole team has been on vacation for the better part of the week, so from a development perspective it was a slow week. Nonetheless the second alpha test is in full swing and runs smoothly.

Martin

Unfortunately, not much to report from my side. I was away for the first three days of the week and over this week-end, leaving merely two days that I had to spend mostly on customer work. So besides some planning and organizing, I didn't really find the time to work on Prosperous Universe. On the bright side: Starting next week, no larger disturbances are on my schedule all the way to the holidays, so I should be back to my regular time budget soon...assuming nothing unexpected comes up!

Michi

Just as Martin I have been away since last friday and came back to the office on Thursday. The few times I actually had access to a computer I checked how the currently running alpha test was going. So far we are pretty happy with it, although the game feels way slower than in the last test. Two weeks ago I wrote about how and what we would change for the second installment of the alpha tests and just as expected the experience changed quite a lot. While the players I spoke with complained about not being able to be self-sufficient from the beginning, they quickly adapted to the new situation and started to trade the things they need to grow their bases. This is exactly what we hoped for and what this test is about.

From a technical perspective almost everything went smoothly so far. We had one critical bug that prevented the actor of the starting system to load correctly. The consequences were that the system map didn't load and players reported strange hydration errors in various parts of the game. After a bit of researching the causes we could patch the server.

Besides supervising the test I wasn't able to implement much new functionality and I concentrated on fixing and improving little things that came up during the test. For example the REA <ticker> command which displays all items that can be build in a reactor now shows how many input materials are necessary for a given output material. I hope that I will be able to continue working on the larger features next week.

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