10/25/2021 - devlog
Ever wanted to document the history of Prosperous Universe? Well now you can!
Michi (molp)
I was pretty busy working on the secret project this week, but still managed to get a few other things done.
The mobile UI project is slowly coming to a point where we can think about releasing it. Therefore, I have been polishing and fixing the most pressing issues, getting it ready for the release. Some features will not be available when it is initially released, such as the maps for example. We'll add them once they become available in the desktop version.
The Faction Expansion Challenge now has seven registrations. We will shortly move into phase three of the challenge, and I want to remind every participant that it is encouraged to start a development log for your endeavour. Ideally, you can use it to describe important milestones, population developments, trading and shipping deals and the like. We'd love to hear about your projects, and I am sure other players will as well! It is totally fine to create a new topic for the devlogs, it doesn't have to be same topic as the one for the registration.
Last week, after some discussion on Discord, we received a pull request for the Handbook to add a new lore section to it! We think it is a great idea to keep the memories of everything that happened in the current and old universes alive! Remember what the CUOP was all about? When was the PC Gamer influx again? Why did I win the Boucher election even though I didn't run for it?
We would love to see all these questions answered in the new lore section! Right now I am still thinking about how to structure this part of the handbook because there have been (and will be more) resets to the universe. Right now, I tend to create one entry for things that persisted over multiple universes (think factions, corporations, ..) and describe their role in the different universes in separate sections. Events, on the other hand, only occur once. As you can tell, this needs your support! We cannot do it alone, and if you feel like contributing to it, you are more than welcome!
Fabian (Counterpoint)
Last week was a bit of a grind, but on the plus side, the faction contracts concept feels almost complete now! One of the last missing pieces was the definition of commodity-based rewards. We will have a few types of faction contracts that will ask you to provide certain commodities, and of course the payment for these contracts has to depend on the specific commodity and amount involved. So, I went through all the commodities in the game and cross-referenced their current market prices with our internal complexity values to find reasonable "reward values" for each one.
Now, this isn't just useful because we can tweak these numbers separately from prices if need be, or just because it will generate payment values fitting the contents of the contract. In addition to that, by fulfilling faction contracts and accumulating "faction reputation" over time, your target reward value will rise over time, so later-game contracts will ask you to provide more and/or more complex commodities. And vice versa, you won't be asked to deliver a ship engine in your first week of playing (since even one unit would go way beyond your initial target reward value).
Of course you could manually avoid these contracts since you'll always have a choice between several faction contracts to pick from. But ideally the picking process itself will be an interesting decision. Also preventing obviously unreasonable contracts from showing up in the first place is quite important.
Nick
Last week we had our first paid Twitch stream from FilthyRobot. It didn't go exactly like how I'd planned but it was a learning experience to say the least. I do believe we have gained some new insights into how new players get stuck or have a hard time figuring out certain aspects that we might not have struggled with ourselves. If we decide to do another Twitch stream, I plan to sit down with the infuencer while he does it live and coach him when he gets stuck, since most of them do not have the time to pre-play the game before the stream. I would also like to invite some of you who know the game very well and would be interested in helping a new player learn the ropes on Twitch. Please let me know if you'd like to be contacted for such an opportunity. FilthyRobot will also edit the stream and post it to YouTube for us later.
We also had a new video from Event Horizon come out last week. There are also several other videos in the pipeline, and probably another will come out this week. Hopefully we will get some quality new players from all of these content creators!
As always: we'd love to hear what you think: join us on Discord or the forums!
Happy trading!