11/30/2020 - devlog
Fabian is hard at work on Ignition testing and hints that not all ships will be out of your price range...
Fabian (Counterpoint)
At the moment I'm mostly in QA and balancing mode for Ignition. Whenever Michi deploys a new feature or change to ship design, performance, fuel usage etc. to our test server, I'll dive into it to compile a list of my observations and the next round of tweaks. Of course I'm also keeping a close eye on the Discord and forums, so please keep the feedback coming!
One noteworthy adjustment we're working on right now is making the smaller ships more affordable in general. The range of shipbuildings costs will still be wide, but we'll lower the bottom barrier of entry quite a bit.
Anyways, I better get back to testing. Next up: ship damage! :)
Nick
Last week was primarily spent on sending out press releases for Ignition which does not sound very involved, but I've had much better luck with getting responses when I contact journalists that have written recent articles about something related to our game whether it be a similar game, economy games, sci-fi sims, etc. This takes a lot of time since I have to scour Google News and then try and find a contact email address or Twitter if all else fails.
We are officially running YouTube ads! I feel like this has taken a year to set up but we are finally doing it! I really excited to see how the platform performs for us and see if we can get it to optimize faster than Facebook ads. Also be on the look out for some new planet artwork, I'm really happy with how things turned out for our next planet spotlights!
Martin
Some very long work weeks are behind me as I am still busy working on our backend system overhaul. Those changes are of course motivated by our impending launch into Early Access and the switch to a subscription-like system that comes with it. But the changes go much further than that and it feels like we're not just modernizining but literally replacing our account management and order processing systems. At the end of the day, this work will hopefully bear fruit in the form of better 3rd-party integrations (especially looking forward to Discord-related possibilities!) and generally faster turnaround times for any future developments involving our backend systems.
That being said, I am...erm...somewhat behind schedule. Fortunately, this has little to no impact on the release of Ignition. But it might push the EA launch back a bit.
As always: We'd love to hear what you think. Join us on Discord or the forums!
Happy trading!