Slow burn – Development Log #125

With Easter getting in the way of work, it's been a short week for the team. Martin spent his time working for AirlineSim, so he'll be taking a timeout from devlogging just this week. Here's what Michi and Julian have been up to:

Michi (molp)

If you have been following my recent devlogs you know that I am working on two refactorings of our code base. In the bigger of the two we are revamping everything that has to do with locations (ships, sites, storages, ...) to have a more versatile foundation to build future features upon. The other refactoring is about flexibilizing the flight model in order to make it easier to use (code-wise) and easier to display in the maps later on. I am now at the point where these two refactorings meet, since ships have locations and if they are flying, they change frequently. It was a short week, due to my Easter vacation, so I'll have to continue the work next week.

Julian (Mjeno)

For the most part this week, I've continued reasearching press contacts. I wanted to get a hold of some journalists attending our upcoming exhibitions, but I couldn't even find out who that is going to be, so I switched back to my regular "sniping" routine. I'm going country by country - or rather language by language. Last week, I completed Germany with 13 people to write to. That doesn't sound like much, but those few hand-picked contacts might be worth more than any press release to an anonymous mass of writers. I also think that this form of reaching out to the press, beside being a lot more personal and invested, is going to be more pleasant for all parties involved. I took the time to read the journalists' pieces, really got into their work and - if all goes well - I'll be able to show them a game they enjoy playing and writing about. I'd also like to emphasize that I don't cherrypick people who are likely to give us a positive review; I'm solely going by potential interest in the genre.

Other than that, I started preparing the upcoming exhibitions: I planned our outfits and the setup of the table, designed and ordered a bunch of business cards etc. As our community grows, I occasionally check out videos and blogs about community management. This week, I updated our Discord channel based on some tips I got from a GDC talk on the topic.

Lastly, we have the fifth and final video of the alpha tutorial for you! It deals with the newly introduced Foreign Exchange feature:

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

Happy trading!