First Steps - Development Log #399

Michi sheds some light on the new project and signs off for summer vacation.

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Michi (molp)

Last Monday we hosted a livestream and talked about the recent Liquidity release and what will come after. If you missed it, you can watch it here:

In this devlog I don't want to talk about the release, I think we covered that pretty well with the last two devlogs, but rather about what is ahead of us.

Back in July, devlog #393 Martin mentioned a new project and that we received funding for it. In the livestream we officially announced what it will entail. Basically it consists of three major feature blocks: the german translation, an update to the politics system and new infrastructure projects.

The project will run for a whole year, so there is going to be plenty of time to go into the details for each feature block as we go. We decided that we will start with the translation first.

You might wonder why we are focusing on that? Don't we have more important things to do with our time? The reasoning behind that is two-fold: First, the funding requires us to make the game available in german, so there is no way around that. Second, Germany is one of the top five countries of our player base. We know from experience that germans really like it when games (and other media btw) are translated into german, and we hope that we can grow the german player base even more.

So, this week, I started with the first steps for providing a german translation. Luckily we have experience with translating games, as our other game AirlineSim has been available in german and english (the officially supported languages) for a long time. There are also a few community provided translations as well.

I started by having a look at the setup of AirlineSim and updated the Prosperous Universe client code where necessary. We anticipated that we might have translations in the future when we started Prosperous Universe, so I luckily didn't have to start from the beginning and the technical foundation is there. There is still plenty of work to be done though, and it'll keep me busy for a while.

August is the traditional summer vacation month in Germany, and this year everyone in the team has a few weeks off during August. So, there is a possibility that there won't be a devlog in the next week and the week after! Shocking! I know!

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

Happy trading!