Central Resources Located - Development Log #338

Fabian explains a small update to the company creation screen, and Nick talks Twitch stream.

Fabian (Counterpoint)

Last week we released another small update to the new company creation to display the "central resources" for each profession.

This way you actually have something to look out for when choosing your starting planet, without having to resort to the handbook to look into what recipes you'll be working with. We also discussed only giving players the planets that "make sense" in the first place as options, but on the other hand we didn't want to cut down on the freedom for veterans. In the future we might introduce an "expert" checkbox that, once enabled, will give you all the options, whereas the default new-player experience will be more guided.

Speaking of guided, one of our next big early-game improvements will be the previously mentioned "faction contracts," which will give you a set of introductory tasks early on and provide randomly generated "quests" later on. While the game will always stay a sandbox primarily, these contracts will provide clearer goals and guidance to those players looking for it, instead the more passive help and hints we have in place right now. By the way, tech-wise these contracts will profit from the "custom contracts" system Michi already started working on.

Nick

Last week, the big thing for me was the Twitch stream that you can see on Blackboa's channel. Unfortunatley we ran into some technical problems again and the stream shut off halfway through and then again at the end. These things happen of course, and Blackboa will be streaming the game on and off as he continues his regular streams. I wanted to thank all the players out there that joined the stream and also chimed in the chat to help other people understand what the game is about. Overall, I think we got some good content from the stream as Michi did a great job of explaining core concepts and Blackboa also had a good understanding of the game. I hope to get more content like this, so that it easily showcases how the game can be played and what can be accomplished at the beginning as a new player while also eluding to more intricate strategies as the game progresses.

As always: we'd love to hear what you think: join us on Discord or the forums!

Happy trading!