Corporate headquarters – Development Log #152

With Martin travelling on business and preparing for the move of the simulogics HQ, the field was once again left mostly to Michi and Julian this week. Michi continued fleshing out the Corporations feature by starting to work on corporation headquarters while Julian took a deep-dive into the world of search engine optimization.

Avatar Michi

Michi (molp)

This week I continued to work through the giant heap of little things that accumulated over the past months...

But in a project like this, it is simply impossible to catch up. :) Alex is working on the final items of the material tree and has now switched focus on balancing the tree. This is of course relevant for me since I have written most parts of the tool he is using to do the balancing and he immediately found some errors and inconsistencies.

On Thursday I finally started to work on a new feature that I hope will make it in the next alpha test: Corporation Headquarters!

A while ago Martin has introduced the corporations in his devlog #142 and #143 but hasn't had time to continue working on the feature since. So we decided that I could take over for a while and contribute to it.

The corporation headquarters will be the first project that a newly founded corporation will have to tackle in order be fully functioning. The HQs will have to be built on a planet and building it will feel similar to building a public planetary project. So far I have made a few (code) architecture sketches and only started implementing on Friday. I hope to be able to show you some screenshots next week.

We are thinking about what benefits the HQ could have for the corporation members and have come up with two things: First, it grants a productivity bonus for every member with a base on the same planet and second, it raises the number of total allowed corporation members to a higher level. We have only started brainstorming on this, let us know what you would add!

Avatar Julian

Julian (Mjeno)

With Phase 1 out of the way, I entered a whole new world this week: the world of search engine optimization. It's not something I knew a lot about when the week began, so I've mostly been reading up on the different techniques and best practices out there. One big take-away has been that SEO evolves all the time. Algorithms change constantly, and so do the measures you need to take to come out on top. Another conclusion I've reached is that "black hat" SEO, i.e. attempts to trick search engines by unfair means, isn't worth the risk. Search engines are always trying to be ahead of the curve and will eventually figure out and punish those who try to exploit their algorithms unfairly. Or maybe not - but it's definitely not something I, a complete beginner, would like to find out first-hand.

SEO is a complex and vast topic, but it's also easy to get into due to the huge amount of free, helpful resources out there. You might also argue that, if a thousand people are readily handing out a thousand different tips each, nobody actually knows how it works. However, I did my best to consult many different websites and videos, looking for recurring techniques, and making sure the tips were backed up by reliable data or at least a case study or two. All this resulted in a big list of possible measures to take on our own websites. I'll run the list by a friend next week, who is the SEO manager of a pretty huge company, and anything he doesn't cross off, I'm going to suggest to Martin and Michi afterwards. They are the ones who will have to implement all the technical SEO measures after all.

Anyway, it's been a fascinating few days. The deeper I got into the topic, the more I felt like our every day lives are heavily impacted by the way search engines work, or at least in a much bigger way than most of us realize. I will share with you what we deemed worth doing at the end of this journey.

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

Happy trading!