1/7/2018 - devlog
Happy New Year everyone! We hope you had relaxing Holidays and start with some fresh energy into the new year! We certainly did and do :) In this week's devlog Martin talks about the start of our new payment system and Michi tries to catch up with the events on the test server.
Martin
I hadn't planned to add anything to this devlog since I will be away on vacation (like...properly, out-of-office, on an island) for the majority of the week. But I ended up working most of the first day of the new year anyhow, so why not write about it...
One thing I left out of last week's end-of-year issue is that I actually managed to deploy our new payment system after Christmas and - most importantly - before the first of January. There are still a few details to iron out, but the general system is up and running and so far has coped quite well with the above-average holiday traffic.
But the real test came on the 1st: That's when I tried for the first time to actually export the accounting data from the new system and import it into our accounting tool. Aside from a few smaller glitches this worked as planned. But converting and cleaning up the actual account structure took a few hours. Anyway, I am very glad to be able to start with a clean slate and to have no "old" accounting data at all in the books in 2018.
Most importantly, though: After some final finishing touches to backend tools and documentation I'll be back to actually work on the game itself some time in January. Can't wait!
Michi
I've been away almost the whole time over the Holidays and haven't had access to a real computer in that time (that's a good thing, right?). So I was pretty eager to find out what happened in that time in our alpha test.
The good news is, that it is still running, no apparent technical errors happened or have been reported. This still amazes me: With around 20 different players and hundreds and thousands of events every day the servers just tick like a swiss watch. I hope it will stay that way when we scale to 100 or 1000 or even more players. It's nice to be able to concentrate on game design and new features.
The bad news is, that nerfing the constructor role didn't work as good as planned. We removed the building modules from the game and replaced it with a system where everyone can build buildings if she has the necessary building materials. We kept the building materials really simple, so everyone could produce them if wanted. It turned out that experienced constructors from the last test did the same thing as last test and sold the small amount of building materials (that where available in the beginning) very expensively. Due to a low influx of metal ores the building materials that followed didn't get any cheaper. The constructors made a fortune and some players spent so much money on building materials that they had cashflow problems afterwards. One constructor even put up a buy order for gold ore for 220000 NCC and thus proves that he actually has that huge amount of money. To put that into perspective: new users start with 25000 NCC.
The prices are currently relaxing a bit, which is a good thing. We will let run this test a bit longer because we want to see how things develop once we leave this tumultuous initial situation behind us.
Besides this I was doing a bit of organizational work and prepared a change for a existing feature, but that's a topic for another time!
As always: we'd love to hear what you think: join us on the forums!
Happy trading!