5/20/2018 - devlog
Michi can finally show the fruit of his labor on the advanced Flight Control, Martin has been busy creating tools for helping stranded players, and Julian has started to stalk a new kind of prey: influencers!
Martin
As planned, I worked on the new admin API of the PrUn server this week. It's a classic REST interface that we will use to inspect and - if necessary - modify entities in the game. My current proof-of-concept merely allows to view the public details of a company and to add inventory to one of its stores. But (a lot) more operations will be added overtime as needed.
Even though Michi has been working on major rewrites over the past weeks that won't be making it into the current alpha test, I decided to base my work off the develop branch which the alpha test is running on. This way we will hopefully be able to help players in the current test with some issues they've run into. Thinking of one poor fellow in particular who's stranded in a lonely part of the universe without a single drop of fuel remaining in his spaceship's tanks...
Michi (molp)
As I mentioned last week I am currently working on the flight model, adding landing and take-off segments.
After a bit of fumbling and tweaking, the landing and take-off segments are calculated correctly now, so it was time to update the user interface. When selecting a target destination, there is now a button (if the target is a planet) to toggle between landing or just orbiting.
Next I added an overview containing detailed information about all segments a flight has. Instead of describing every detail of it, I leave you with a quick demo:
Julian (Mjeno)
Thanks to the exhibitions in Berlin and Munich and the subsequent week of music composition, I hadn't done any "normal" work for the game in almost a month. Coming back this week and looking at the massive amount of tasks ahead, I decided to rearrange them into a roadmap outlining the foreseeable future.
I then tackled the task at its very beginning: researching influencers! I spent some time entering relevant terms into Youtube's search bar and checking out the channels that came up on the first couple of pages. Youtube is said to be unfair to small channels in a number of ways, but looking for niche content I easily found quite a few Youtubers with only a few thousand subscribers each. I've come to learn that it's common practice to pay Youtubers for featuring a game on their channel, especially with ad revenue becoming a less and less sustainable source of income for small content creators in particular. However, right now I'm hoping to find a few small channels who are genuinely interested in Prosperous Universe, rather than paying some big channel to read a nice script about the game for us. I'm generally skeptical about sponsored content not being marked as such, but the prospect of a Youtuber telling their audience about being paid to promote the game doesn't make me happy either. I'm hoping to take money out of the equation completely and just build a good relationship with a couple of Youtubers instead; they make some videos about our game, we provide them with material for giveaways, listen to their criticism, and post their content on our channels in return.
I'll keep you updated on how that turned out!
As always: we'd love to hear what you think: join us on the forums!
Happy trading!