10/26/2020 - devlog
LIVE STREAM on Thursday at 16:00 UTC, details below! Meanwhile, the team plugs away on UI updates and ship building blueprints that bring us ever closer to Ignition.
Michi (molp)
Last week I finally started to work on the actual Ignition release. It started as usual: I went through the design documents and created a long list of tasks to implement. Each task belongs to a sub-goal (we call them 'epic') of the release and goes with a short description. Finally the list of tasks is converted into actual tickets in the issue tracker. This formalism might seem overly complex, or even redundant given that we already have the game design documents from Fabian, but it helps me when visualizing every aspect of a release and gives me a better understanding of the tasks ahead.
Of, course there is not much to see yet, but I still wanted to share a work-in-progress screenshot:
I added the new blueprint command BLU. Without parameters it is a list of all created blueprints a company has. Right now it only shows very basic information and has a button that allows a detailed view of a single blueprint to be opened.
In this first iteration of ship building blueprints consists of a series of component selections. For example, you can choose between four different kinds of STL engines. Each option will have one or more modifiers (e.g. STL speed +x%) that will change the performance parameters of the ship. Other components will include reactor type, storage sizes, hull types and more.
Nick
First things first: we are doing a Live Stream this Thursday at 16:00 UTC (17:00 CET, 12pm EDT, 9am PDT, 03:00 AEDT). Keep your eyes posted on our social media channels for the link and follow us on YouTube! We will discuss topics related to post-Populous release as well as some of topics from the community. Of course you can also write in any questions or comments that you might have while we are streaming.
Another special announcement: Iridium will be joining us as a guest during the Live Stream to voice his opinions and give valuable feedback as a governor in Prosperous Universe! I hope you all will join us in support of the game and its members. I had a really great chat with some of the governors last week, and I think we are going to have a great selection of topics for the stream. I'm really excited for Thursday so don't forget to join in!
Martin
As you probably know, one of our biggest mid-term projects is the mobile UI for Prosperous Universe. But alongside the mobile design, we are also working towards a cleaner design for the desktop version as well as a more harmonized look across all the pages around the game, like the website and the account management systems. Since this will require us to touch code in a lot of places, we realized that some parts of our (legacy) infrastructure aren't really up to the task anymore, while some architecture decisions that we made four or so years ago for our PrUn-specific systems didn't age too well.
So even though I was hoping to focus more on the game and less on backend stuff, I am back at work on our account management systems. This will be a pretty major rewrite of systems that - in part - have been operational for 10+ years. Once done, we hope to have less code duplication between the auxiliary systems required for all our games. Other nice side-effects will be easier extensions and integrations in the future and an overhauled look, of course. But more on the details in future devlogs!
As always: We'd love to hear what you think. Join us on Discord or the forums!
Happy trading!