7/22/2024 - devlog
Michi has started to work on the gateway implementation and talks about the difference between planetary and infrastructure projects.
Michi (molp)
The week before, Fabian had to pleasure to announce what we'll be working on next: gateways.
To be precise, the work has started a while ago, with Fabian creating a game design document for the gateways, but the actual implementation phase started last week. I am really looking forward to the implementation. The gateways will be late-game content. They will change the connectivity of the map and how traveling the universe feels. They are physical objects, and we will show them on the maps. I am pretty sure they'll fit nicely into the political framework we are building.
Where to start with such a big project? I chose to start with the gateway construction itself. My first instinct was to create a planetary project for it, let's call it Gateway Control Center. The control center would have been the requirement for all gateway related activities, including construction. The planetary projects are currently limited to one per planet though. The control center would mitigate this problem as it would allow to build multiple gateways that themselves are not planetary projects in the technical sense. That solution would be similar to the shipyards only that the control center would produce gateways instead of ships.
After talking with Martin and Fabian we scrapped that idea though. Ideally we want to have many different kind of infrastructure projects in the future, and it doesn't seem right to create a "center" planetary project for all of them. Even more so, not all future infrastructures should be located in a planet's orbit. They also could appear in a system orbit or close to a station and so on.
The idea is now to make them independent (technically speaking again) from planets. Since we'll only allow governments to create and operate gateways in the first iteration, we'll restrict them to their own planets for now.
We also thought of a different way to contribute materials to a gateway construction project. A planetary project will be visible to everyone and everyone is able to contribute materials to it. The contribution has its own UI with sliders for each building material where a contributor can select how much they want to contribute. For planetary projects this works fine, but it doesn't feel right for infrastructure projects.
Instead, the governments will be able to appoint a player as the responsible constructor for a project via a motion. That motion will result in a contract with payment conditions and so on. Once the constructor closes the contract and starts the project a new kind of inventory appears: the construction store. For the most part it behaves like a usual warehouse store, but it only accepts the construction materials and also only in the required quantities. It looks like this:
One of the advantage of using a real store over the donation system is, that the constructor can use existing contract types to allow other players to ship materials to that store. I was able to finish the implementation of the construction site stores this week, the motions and everything else I talked about will follow.
As always: we'd love to hear what you think: join us on Discord or the forums!
Happy trading!