8/24/2020 - devlog
In this week's devlog: Fabian gets spaceship fever, Nick takes up YouTube and the field of economics, Manoj hops between design projects, and Martin puts out server fires.
Fabian (Counterpoint)
Last week was all about ship-building materials for me. I entered all the new commodities into our material tree editor alongside their descriptions, weights, volumes and recipes. This gave me a rough idea in regards to the balancing of the new materials and also, ships as a whole, which - as expected - will be among the most expensive things you'll be able to build in our PrUniverse. Of course there'll be a pretty wide range though depending on which exact ship components you pick in our ship designer, so you'll certainly be able to find some "budget builds" by saving on engine thrust, reactor power, the size of your cargo bay or fuel tanks and so on.
As of right now, I'm still tweaking the production effort and recipes of some materials, but things are coming together quite nicely. I just have to remember to take a break and work on some other topic from time to time. Recently the "ship components" material tree slowly started morphing into an actual spaceship before my very eyes...
Nick
Based on the findings from last week's Facebook Ads, we have decided to move forward with the video ad which features a short clip of the Free to Play Trailer. Since we are first and foremost a game, it makes sense that people will want to see some form of gameplay footage and I think the clip brings a bit of intrigue to what can be accomplished as a player. This week I will be tweaking the ad a bit and hopefully we will bring even more players into the game! I am also happy to report that we will also be trying out YouTube ads soon, so that is something to really look forward to as well.
Another thing I started working on was an HVCO (High Value Content Offer) for economics. I already contacted a few players to get some inside knowledge on "economic stories" that happened throughout the years in PrUn. If you have any interesting or cool stories to tell as they relate to topics like: Keynesian economics, behavorial economics (game theory), inflation, recession, stagflation, please send me a message. I am no economist, so any tips are much appreciated.
Manoj
Last week I had to do a lot of context switching between the two games, Prosperous Universe and Airline Sim. I designed the new dashboard layout for Airline SIM so that it will show the list of current Game Worlds. I also designed the new website landing and account pages for Prosperous Universe. I'm excited to explore the story of Prosperous Universe and give the website a new look.
Martin
Housekeeping tasks like upgrading the libraries and build tools used by our web client finally wrapped up last week. As usual, it took longer than expected, but I feel like we're ready to get started on the first prototypes of the upcoming mobile UI.
In classic "you don't know what you've got till it's gone" fashion, I spent quite a bit of time holding the hand of our server and coming up with hot fixes for live issues...something that would usually be taken care of by Michi when he doesn't happen to be on vacation. Needless to say, I can't wait for him to be back ;-)
As always: We'd love to hear what you think. Join us on Discord or the forums!
Happy trading!