Hints and Cookies - Development Log #280

Nick is still on vacation, and I hope he will be back soon, because I am pretty bad at writing these blog post summaries and coming up with smart names for the posts :D. Anyways, this time we talk about a hint system for new players and the surprisingly tricky implementation of cookie banners.

Michi (molp)

My quest for improving the new player experience continues. As you might remember, I talked about a new UI tutorial in the last two devlogs introducing the APEX interface itself. Fabian specified a set of helpful hints that will aid new players on the gameplay side of things. These hints are not so much a tour (as the UI tutorial) of early gameplay, but rather a loosely coupled series of helpful texts, links and tips that pop up at certain times.

We do use the standard APEX buffer system to show the hints to the players. There is a new command called HINT that shows a list of all hints, or a specific hint when using a parameter. Right now there are nine hints that are being triggered once the new player has performed certain actions, or a defined amount of time has passed. The hint system can be disabled.

Here is an early example of a hint that guides players towards the recommended buildings for the selected starting profile.

Martin

There are still some parts of our migration to the new website/account backend that aren't quite finished yet. Among those are some of the tracking mechanisms we use to verify whether our ads are working as they are supposed to. Not only because of GDPR, but because we honestly think that your data shouldn't be handed over to third parties without your consent, I was working on an annoying but necessary cookie consent banner implementation for the website. Getting this to work in a way that actually prevents us from loading third party code before you have agreed to doing so is surprisingly tricky. So much so that I am convinced that 80% of the "cookie banners" out there don't actually do anything. Either way...after some finishing touches from Melanie, I hope it will be able to go out some time later this week.

As always: We'd love to hear what you think. Join us on Discord or the forums!

Happy trading!