next »

[Mjeno]

Development log #214

The end of the year brought some long awaited good news: our funding application has been accepted! With the holidays coming up next week this has been the last proper work week in December. Martin has managed to finish the analytics project just before he went on vacation and Michi tried get as many issues as possible off our backlog, affectionately called The List.


Martin

I did it! My one big goal for the final days of the year has been to finally wrap up the analytics project that has been keeping me busy for what feels like months now. Obviously, the time I actually spent working on it wasn’t all that much. It’s just that the past few months have been extremely busy for me, with lots of customer work (including a couple of longer business trips) and the whole funding application going on, of course.

On that note: We have received preliminary confirmation that our application has been accepted! Technically that means we could start working under the terms of the funding program right now. In practice nothing will start moving before the beginning of January. I’ll be spending some time with family for the remainder of the year and the contracts with both our new game designer and frontend developer won’t start before the first.

So enjoy the holidays everyone and get some peace! I sure will, because 2020 is going to be a crazy ride!


Michi (molp)

We scheduled a in-person meeting for early January, so I decided it would not make any sense to spend my time planning and scheming this week, as I often do after a larger release. Instead I decided to do whatever is currently on the list and try to fix as many small issues as possible. Here are a few examples:

The first election for a governor ended earlier this week. Unfortunately I was elected, due to a simple bug I didn’t catch during testing. I even had a testcase, but it didn’t cover that exact case Anyways the fix was easy and while I was at it a few players mentioned that it was impossible to check the outcome of a past election. So I decided to add a simple command (ADMT) showing the details of a term. It is accessible by clicking on the term number in the ADM tile. Terms are consecutively numbered so it is easy to find past ones, going back further than the those shown in the “previous terms” list. This change is already live!

I also added a notification that is triggered whenever a planetary project is finished. Every site owner on a respective planet will receive it.

Sometimes it is hard to tell if one is looking at the right ship flight controls. Usually the “right” ship is the one with the cargo that needs shipping. Up until now it wasn’t easy to access the ship’s inventory, so I added an inventory line to the flight controls.

Talking about notifications: I added the name of the commodity to the .. a trade took place and Commodity order filled .. notifications. This change has been requested countless times. Time to cross it off the list

I’ll also spend the rest of the year with friends and family, so have a good one and see you next year!

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

Happy trading!

[Mjeno]

Development log #215


Martin

Another year has passed. With the team on holidays and the development efforts of the past week focusing primarily on the build-up of personal fat reserves, I’m taking the opportunity to take a brief look at 2019 and 2020. A “State of the Universe”, so-to-speak.

A year in releases

Pretty exactly a year ago, Prosperous Universe launched into First Access. Since then, we’ve switched into almost classic MMOG development mode with more or less frequent content updates. The objective: Expanding on the basic tools PrUn has to offer (production, transport, trade) to make the game an enjoyable long-term experience.

The results are a mixed bag: On the one hand, Alpha 7 has been running since early this year and as such a lot longer than we had planned. We have a great community with lots of very dedicated players, helping each other out and playing the game pretty much exactly in the way we intended, namely on a meta-level, setting higher-level economic goals to be reached by working together in a Corporation (or outside of one). We have launched into Free-2-Play, giving more people easier access to the game. And we have added quite a few mid-level features, like the Local Markets and recently the Admin Center with the new political features it brings.

On the other hand, our conversion rates still leave a lot to be desired, meaning we get quite a few new players, but only few of them actually stick around. This translates into very slow growth of the game. Combined with the fact that you can play for free and PRO access only requires a single payment at the moment, the overall revenue generated by the game is almost symbolic in nature.

But all in all, we are confident by now that we have a game at our hands that will work as intended eventually…we just need to find the final missing pieces. A year ago, we weren’t as certain of this as we are now.

Going on hard burn

When 2019 was a 0.3g gentle coast, 2020 will be a 5g hard burn!

Sadly, Julian will be disembarking before we drop the first pellet into the reactor. If you want to take his post on the crew: We still have the position listed on our website!

But the team will grow nonetheless: The funding we applied for mid-2019 has been granted only a few days ago, meaning two new team members will be joining us starting January. One is a game designer, tasked with finding that missing piece I mentioned above, the other is a web frontend developer who’ll be working on bringing the APEX UI to a totally new level and - as one of the primary goals of the project we got funding for - to make it work on small screens and mobile devices.

What this means is that the team that’s actually involved in developing Prosperous Universe will jump from “a little more than one” (Michi and myself, with my own development time very much consumed by admin and backend tasks) to “more than three”. For the first time, we will have a dedicated game designer on board, so we don’t have to half-ass it ourselves or rely on external volunteers (thanks bunches, Alex!) anymore to get the job done. And making the game more visually pleasing as well as more accessible on more platforms should help with those conversation rates, all while making the job of Julian 2.0 a bit easier!

It’s hard to tell just how big of a leap Prosperous Universe will make next year, but my gut tells me that it is going to be substantial!

Closing on this positive note, I wish you all a happy new year 2020.

A big thank you goes out to each and everyone who helped us in keeping this project going throughout 2020, especially Alex, who helped us out a lot in terms of game design and even project management, as well as our high-tier supporters who invested an incredible amount of trust in us. Believe me when I say that the amount of excitement on the team is incredible when someone actually pushes the “buy” button on a Cluster Tier!

Last but not least a thing I want to repeat: A huge thanks to our extremely civilized, friendly and helpful community! We all know how toxic and unpleasant communities on the internet can be and I speak for everyone on the team when I say that we are incredibly thankful that our community is pretty much the direct opposite! It’s a pleasure to make a game for a crowd like this!

Stay tuned for more details as things unfold and as always: Happy trading!

[Mjeno]

Development log #216

What a way to start the year! Fabian, our new game systems designer, joined the team, and a favorable review on PC Gamer expanded the community by a good 300%.


Martin

Similar to Michi, I spent my first working days of 2020 playing catch-up. The PC Gamer article caught us by surprise and while we didn’t face any fundamental technical issues - the servers seemed to cope with the influx quite well - the spike in traffic rattled the tree quite a bit and out fell several bugs that went unnoticed so far.

Also just like Michi, I did some preparing for next week’s kick-off meeting with Fabian and Frank (we’re changing the rules: new hires’ names have to start with an F instead of an M from now on). One of the main topics of the three-day meeting will be game design and the recent rush of new players and its side-effects (full exchange planets, for example) will be informing our discussions quite substantially.

Last but not least, I started work on the long-overdue chore of migrating our backend server to the latest version of the actor framework we’re using. It comes with a bunch of new instrumentations that should help with analyzing server issues, among other things.


Julian (Mjeno)

Happy 2020, guys! Imagine my surprise earlier this week when I joined the game and saw close to 300 connected users. Someone soon identified the PC Gamer article to be the source of all the new community members. So again, welcome to the new players! Happy to have you guys here.

For me, this meant a lot of support work, as some people didn’t get their confirmation e-mails, had their payments rejected, wondered why their license status didn’t update etc. Apart from that, we are still getting applications for our Community Manager job ad, which I’m still catching up on. If you applied a few days ago, don’t worry - we will get back to you very soon!


Fabian (Counterpoint)
Hi! I’m incredibly excited to have joined Prosperous Universe as game systems designer this week. Given the complexity and uniqueness of the project as well all the documents and ideas I already went through the last couple days, it will be quite the challenge. That’s part of why I’m here though. It’s what makes things interesting in the first place, right?

For now I’m getting accustomed to the game, documentation and tools. Not least to prepare for the 3-day workshop we’ll be having next week. Really looking forward to meeting the team in person!

In case you’d like to learn more about who I am, find me on Twitter via @Ludokultur. My profile has all the links. Also don’t hesitate to contact me on our Discord if you have any questions (I’m the new guy with the dev role called “Counterpoint”)!


Michi (molp)

Happy new year everyone! I started this year with catching up what happened in the last week and a half. I tried to stay away as far as I could from any PC during the holidays and only checked occasionally what was going on the game via my mobile phone.

As you can image the PC Gamer article and the resulting influx of new players kept me busy for the rest of the week. These events tend to wash up errors and bugs way faster than during “normal” times and so I was bug hunting the whole time. We had one especially nasty bug that almost lead to a core meltdown and Martin and I had a hard time figuring out what was going on. We now have an idea what might cause it, but we do not have a definitive fix yet.

Besides all the bugs I spent some time preparing a meeting in simulogics HQ that will happen next week! For the first time Martin and me will meet the two new guys in person! More about that next week!

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

Happy trading!

[Mjeno]

Development log #217

This week was a very productive one, starting with a 3-day bootcamp at simulogics HQ and ending with some possible solutions to the current overflowing hub worlds.


Martin

There’s good news and there’s bad news this week.

The bad news first: As you probably know by now, the team came together for a three-day meeting at simulogics HQ. We are a 100% remote team and we only meet at a single physical location for important reasons. The reason for this week’s meeting was that two new members are joining the team: Fabian, who you’ve already read from and about in the previous issue of the devlog, and Frank, who was supposed to start this Monday. But due to a serious injury, Frank got admitted to a hospital the day before and will be stuck there for several weeks. Therefore, he obviously was neither able to make the trip nor to start working on the project. We wish him a speedy recovery!

But I tend to see the positive side of things, so here’s the good news: Because the frontend development aspect of the meeting basically fell flat, we had a full three days to focus on game design. And in hindsight, that was a good thing. The ideas and vision behind this project are vast, with a lot of very personal, arbitrary and hard-to-describe aspects to it that are almost impossible to write down in a style-guide, let alone in a brief vision statement. So just sitting down and discussing all these things was incredibly helpful. It will be hard enough as it is for Fabian to find his way into the world of PrUn as Michi and myself imagine it, but after this week, it should be tad easier.


Fabian (Counterpoint)

To me this week’s workshop was invaluable when it came to understanding the vision behind Prosperous Universe, as well as possible future directions. Besides discussing more fundamental questions such as what the game was, is and is supposed to be, we also touched on tons of current “hot topics” and feature ideas for the near and far future. The amount of knowledge thrown around was so excessive that I even learned about the difference between ducks and geese. Go figure!

Luckily we were able to resolve a few open questions for the next couple of updates which, at this point, aren’t that design-intensive anymore, so I can concentrate on working my way deeper into the game. Right now I’m drafting quite a few models and mind maps of basically every relevant gameplay element, the “big one” of course being the whole commodity production tree. In the latter half of the month, I plan to dive into the first design changes and drafts for future features.


Michi (molp)

Besides all the game design scheming that happened at our three-day meeting at simulogics HQ, we also talked about the very urgent issue of available planetary plots in the current alpha. As most of you know, the recent PC Gamer article led to a great influx of new players and the remaining plots at the three hubs (Montem, Promitor, Katoa) were taken pretty fast and there are still no free plots available. While that is, technically speaking, no serious problem since roughly 50% of all starting planet plots are still available, it has some implications for player retention. New players tend to start at one of the hubs because it is the easiest start one can have. If they start somewhere else, there is a higher risk of them not continuing playing.

To solve this problem, we thought of three solutions.

We will reduce the amount of time until we delete a completely inactive, new company to eight days. After three days, the players will receive an e-mail notification about the pending deletion and if they don’t react, the deletion will happen five days later. This will remove the companies of all players that just checked out the game and never came back. We will release this change with the next maintenance update.

We will also double the amount of plots on the three hub planets. The current alpha has been running for a long time now and there is no reset in sight. It was never intended to hold that many players, let alone the vast amounts after a spike like the one we experienced recently. That’s why we want to make room for potential new spikes in player count. This game design band-aid will also be released with the next maintenance update.

Finally we thought of a mechanism that will allow more planets to become starting planets in the future. This change might need a restart, though, and will therefore have to wait a bit. Once we restart the universe, we’ll also make sure to not make the the hub planets as strong as they are now. Maybe we might even turn the planetary commodity exchanges into space stations, so everyone will have to fly there. But that is all dreams of the future!

By the way, we expect that some of the plots will free up in the next week, so keep an eye on the hubs!

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

Happy trading!

[Mjeno]

Development log #218

This week, the team has worked on various tasks such as managing job applications, making a mental image of the game’s systems, and preparing an upcoming maintenance patch.


Julian (Mjeno)

First off, sorry for my absence last week. I didn’t really have much of interest to report and decided to quietly skip the development log for once. We had a call on Thursday in which I relayed quite a bit of community feedback to the rest of the team, most of which will be put through The Filter shortly.

The most important bit of my work this week was to get back to the first applicants to our PR & Community Manager job ad. If you applied for the job and haven’t heard back from me yet, I’m sorry - you’ve probably not made it to the shortlist. Chances are it’s due to a technicality; we’ve been going back and forth between our accountant and the ministry co-funding our development for the next year in order to find out what exactly the rules for the new position are. Unfortunately, we’ve now learned that the person would need to have a German employment contract, meaning that they have to reside in Germany. We don’t want to ask anyone to relocate across the globe, especially since the job would still be remote and our funding is secured for only a year. That is why we’ve been focusing on Germany and its adjacent countries in this first round of replies.


Martin

While Michi is working on the user-facing changes of our upcoming maintenance release, I continued to work on framework-related stuff. I mostly finished the migration to the latest version of the actor framework we use and spent some time ensuring that everything stills works as expected. As mentioned before, the side-effects of this upgrade are minor performance improvements and some additional instrumentation that’ll help us troubleshoot issues in the future as well as improve our deployment process (like shorter connection losses during upgrades). The latter will require some more work, though.

That’s about it for this week. My plan is to also dive into some actual game development for once before the end of the month and I seriously can’t wait for that to happen!


Fabian (Counterpoint)

As mentioned last week, I’m deep into the process of grasping the game as a whole. This includes pages upon pages of notes on existing features, upcoming ones and all kinds of things I notice while playing. And given us systems designers like to keep “mental images” of the things we work on in our minds, it also includes creating actual visual models. Given the game’s scope, these can get quite extensive…

Michi (molp)

I am currently working on a small maintenance update that we will release at the end of the month. As usual a whole list of issues, bugs and quality of life improvements etc have been piling up while we have been working on the last named release (‘Expanse’) and now is the time to work on these issues.

Here are a few examples:

When deleting the last building of a production line, the UI hangs and only a refresh of APEX will show the new correct state. I fixed that and deleting buildings works as intended now.

As mentioned last week, I doubled the amount of available plots on the three hub worlds.

Ever since we introduced the production fees, we received complaints from player that their production would not work for some reason and the next production order would not be started. This was in almost all the cases due to missing funds for the production fee. I included a new error message similar to the existing ‘input missing’ and ‘no capacity’ messages:

During the recent influx of new players, we noticed that base building is not as self-explanatory as it could be. After clicking the ‘start base’ button some players don’t know how to continue and it is not very obvious what to do. For example, if the PLI window is small, the UI overlaps the display of the planetary surface making the selection of a plot really hard. I decided to move the base building into its own window similar to the creation process of corporation projects. In this new UI, we have enough space to explain and guide the players. Here is a work in progress version:

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

Happy trading!

[Mjeno]

Development log #219

We’re in between releases. The post-PC Gamer rush has ebbed away a bit and we’re slowly setting our sights on the next named release. But before that happens, Michi is shaping the upcoming maintenance patch into a big bundle of QoL improvements and bugfixes while Fabian continues to wrap his head around the complexities of the game, especially the different starting profiles and the general “new player” experience.


Martin

My week was kind of short and primarily focused on interviewing the first batch of candidates to replace Julian some time later this spring. Julian and I interviewed six candidates and almost all of them left a very good impression…it’s going to be a tough call!

On Friday I had the honor to speak at the 20th anniversary party of NLnet Labs in Amsterdam. I was invited to talk a bit about what we do and how we ended up doing it, which happens to be quite an unusual story going back all the way to 2002. The other talks were very interesting as well and the event as a whole was great fun. Thanks for having me!

That said, I plan to be back at actual game development (for once) next week, getting started on the preliminary work for our next named release. It’s going to contain some features that our players most certainly are going to love!


Fabian (Counterpoint)

This week I continued my “getting to know Prosperous Universe” month by delving (back) into the new-player experience. For example, I compared starting packages based on how clearly they suggest the first short-term goals to players, whether there are interesting choices to make right from the start and where players can go after following the recommended first steps. From my findings, some of the packages could use more love than others or maybe could be replaced entirely, but this is also a matter of making changes to the tech tree as a whole, so we’ll certainly get back to it later down the line.

Besides packages, I also went over the first-few-sessions experience and accessibility in general and compiled a long list of potential problems and suggestions on how to go about solving them. This is something we will discuss rather soon, since improvements for new players are quite high on our list, especially if they’re “low-hanging fruit”.

Lastly, I also took a quick look at MM prices and actual market prices for minerals and ores, which revealed a few balancing issues, especially in comparison with early-game agriculture. We’ll look into it further, but you can probably expect some balancing changes in the not too distant future.


Michi (molp)

I continued to work on the next maintenance release this week. We decided that we will release it on Thursday January 30th and you can check out the official release notes on the forums.

I kept all the boring bugfixes for this week, so there is not much to show. One bug is rather interesting and a few players tripped over it in the last few weeks: All currencies in the game have two decimal places but they are not shown everywhere. Usually one would use decimal places in FX or ComEx orders, but the sidebar, FINLA and other commands don’t show them for the sake of simplicity. The component that displays the amount of money is aware of the decimal places though and rounds up and down accordingly, e.g. rounds up if the fraction is >= .5. We received multiple reports that contractual payment conditions could not be fulfilled even though the players seemingly had the money. In the end the rounding was the culprit. The players were only fractions of a unit short, but APEX displayed the rounded up value.

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

Happy trading!

[Mjeno]

Development log #220

In today’s development log, we’re addressing a few issues the past release brought with it – but more importantly, you’re getting a good look at the next, much bigger one!


Michi (molp)

It has been one of these weeks where you start with a clear plan: finish the maintenance release, release it, work on the new named release. But things never turn out the way you think. It is now Friday afternoon and I have yet to start working on the new named release. The backend release Martin mentioned and the maintenance release left us with a lot of unexpected bugs to clean up: hanging production lines, full ship inventories that have no visible cargo, just to mention two. But the good news is that we fixed most of the issues and therefore we got the maintenance release out of the way.

Speaking of releases, I thought it would be about time to introduce the next named release with the code name Presence!

Presence is all about local market shipping contracts that you have requested so many times. We want to keep it simple, keep the development time short and see how it turns out. If everything goes according to our plan (hint: it won’t) we will release the feature at the end of February, early March. Presence really consists of three main parts, one of which is rather technical:

The local markets will get a new ad type called shipping. A company looking for someone to transport some of their goods will be able to post an ad. The ad will share a lot of elements with the existing ads (commodity, amount, currency, price, delivery time, ad visibility) and introduce two new ones: origin and destination. With these components the creator of the ad can determine where the hauler should pick up the goods and where to drop them off. The requirements are that the principal must own fixed stores, e.g. no ships, at both locations and one of the locations must be the local market. Right now this would only be possible if the principal had two bases, which brings us to the next change.

We will introduce a new planetary project called warehouses (proper name pending) that works like a self-storage facility. Players can rent storage units that will work just like a storage building in a base. These units will require a weekly rental fee that is being set by the planetary governor. If the warehouse runs out of available storage units an expansion is possible up to a certain amount of times to increase the number of storage units.

The last change handles the representation of freight in a haulers inventory. The freight will be represented as a generic icon with a certain weight and volume so the hauler will not know about its contents. Clicking on it will open the corresponding contract. We might even use this method to display materials that are being provisioned for a pick-up condition to make it more obvious that they are still in the inventory, but blocked.


Fabian (Counterpoint)

This week was about nailing down the planning for the “Presence” release, including the balancing for the new planetary project and the gameplay possibilities it will enable. Other than that, I continued last week’s inquiries regarding a MM rebalancing for certain products, which should also find its way into said release. Finally, since research and concept work can’t start early enough, I already invested some time into thinking about the next big feature we have our eyes on after Presence. But that’s a topic for another day…


Martin

A little story from the trenches today, maybe a bit technical:

A lot (well, a couple) of confused faces could be seen in the simulogics development offices this week: After we rolled out my backend release which, if anything, should have introduced some performance improvements, we saw drastic decreases in performance across the board. All server nodes were using a lot more memory and the CPUs where running at more than twice the load compared to before the patch.

So I started looking for the cause. The problem in a situation like this usually is that you are missing exactly the kind of instrumentation you need at that very moment. In our case we saw an above-average amount of so-called “hydration timeouts” which basically just means that the client requested a piece of data that contains references to one or more entities (like companies), but that the information to display those entities (like a company’s name) could not be retrieved from the respective entity actor in time before the data is sent to the client. In that case, the general piece of data is sent to the client but the entity references are still just that: references. The end-user gets to see a “Hydration Timout” error message with the respective entity ID instead.

There are basically two reasons why such a timeout can happen: Either the respective entity is broken and therefore can’t reply to the request at all or it’s just busy and replies too late. When an entity is broken, it’s pretty obvious because we see the errors on the logs, and when it’s too busy, it is most likely because it is “recovering” (more on what that means in another devlog on the architecture of PrUn that I have promised for ages now). But because the latter has never been an issue before and we had optimizations to the recovery mechanism planned for the future anyway, we never put in any instrumentation to track how long it actually took.

After I hacked in a quick-and-dirty logging mechanism we realized that many entities take well above a minute to recover now, which in itself did not explain our problem, though: They surely didn’t start taking this long just this week. It must have been the case before and users didn’t notice any performance problems of this magnitude before the upgrade.

It took Michi’s shrewd eyes to notice that many entities would show up more than once. That’s weird because once an entity has recovered and it doesn’t get passivated for any reason, it should remain active in memory. So after many hours of searching, I found the culprit: A single configuration flag the default value of which has changed between releases of our actor framework. It just killed any actor after 2 minutes of idling, forcing our whole simulation into a constant state of reloading entities. After changing “120s” to “off”, the problem was gone. And so were many hours of my precious time…


Julian (Mjeno)

Hi, guys! I’d like to take a moment to say that I’m still with simulogics and will stay around until at least the end February. Apparently, some of you thought I had already moved on, but you’re not getting rid of me that easily. I just haven’t had much interesting to report over the past few weeks. Same this week, actually; I’ve been preparing a final round of interviews with my potential successors next week and spent a lot of time translating our new TOS and Privacy Statement. I know, fascinating stuff. (: See you next week!

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

Happy trading!

[Mjeno]

Development log #221

Work on the Presence update has officially kicked into gear. Have a first look at the upcoming upgradable warehouses in today’s devlog!


Michi (molp)

I finally started to work on our next named release Presence this week! As usual with new features there is not much to show yet as I usually start to implement them on the server first and then move to the client. To be able to show at least a bit in this devlog I created the new warehouse command WAR and started to flesh it out:

The warehouse is a planetary project just like the existing ones and can be built on any planet without any dependencies. Once it is finished, the command shown above will be available. The upper half shows general information about the warehouse like its current operator (e.g. faction or the governor’s corporation), the current fees and how many storage units are available.

The ‘rental’ section contains company specific information, for example how many units have been rented, how much storage space is available and of course a link to the store itself. I will add more information to this section later, especially about the next due rent.

Finally, the last section will contain information about the current extension status of the warehouse. As stated in the last devlog, the warehouse will be extendable a few times to increase the amount of storage units.


Fabian (Counterpoint)

While the actual implementation work for the “Presence” release started this week, I pretty much fully focussed on coming up with ideas and conceptual drafts for the next, yet to be disclosed, named release. We’ll soon discuss its content more in detail internally, and once we clearly settle in on a design direction we’ll be able to share more with all of you.

In terms of the nearer future, I’m keeping an eye on market prices to finalize the MM balancing tweaks I mentioned a couple weeks back. Also, there were some interesting discussions and suggestion in the forums and on the Discord surrounding the topic of “order deletion penalties”. The intention there is not just to put a stop to “market maker” bots, but also to make being online all the time to undercut your competitors’ prices by a cent again and again less attractive. We haven’t decided on it yet, but it’s certainly an option and it’s great to see all those constructive debates. Keep the feedback coming!


Martin

Short and sweet: As Michi already discussed, implementation work on “Presence” commenced this week. My job right now is to get some rather fundamental changes into the game’s storage system. Right now, all stores in the game deal with quantities of materials only. But for Presence, we need to support discrete “items”, which behave slightly differently. Most of the respective server-side changes are done and my client-side work was focused primarily on getting everything back to work the way it did before the required changes to the data structures. Next week I’ll work on actually displaying and handling items in the client. Once that’s done, Michi can take over and implement the new shipping contracts.

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

Happy trading!

[Mjeno]

Development log #222

This week, the team has been integrating the new warehouses into the planetary inventory system, which required a bigger rework than one might think. Meanwhile, the big release after Presence is already taking shape.


Michi (molp)

I continued to work on the warehouses this week. Last week I showed you the user interface that allows to rent storage units and while it seems almost finished from the UI perspective there is still a lot of work to do on the backend. I started by actually generating a new store once the player rents a storage unit for the first time on any given planet. Of course, the capacity of this store needs to be adjusted when another storage unit is being rented. Multiple units at the same warehouse are combined into one logical store, that way it is way more comfortable to use by the players.

With the warehouses in place, it is now possible to have more than one fixed (e.g. non-ship) store at a given location, the store that comes with a base and a warehouse storage unit. This sounds trivial, but it has implications: For example, there is the INVP command that shows the inventory at a given planetary location. Which inventory should be shown if there are two stores at a location? We decided to remove the INVP command in favor of a more flexible INV command!

The INV command can now be used in three different ways:

If there are no parameters for the command, a list of all stores (bases, ships, fuel tanks, warehouses) is shown.
If the command has a planetary address as parameter (like INV XK-194c), it will either show a list of stores at that location (if there are more than one) or just show the inventory of the store.
The command also accepts the store ID as a parameter (INV 3F2S) and will show its contents-
I also added filters to the command which allow to show/hide certain types of stores. The filter settings are persistent if the command is used in a screen.

Fabian (Counterpoint)

This week I honed in on one particular version of the concept for the next big release after Presence. We’ll soon discuss it in the team and see if we agree on the general direction or want to make some changes.

In terms of Presence itself, I’m making up my mind about the before-mentioned balancing changes to MM buy prices. Expect agriculture to get a nerf and ores a substantial buff pretty much across the board. In addition, a couple minerals will be tweaked and construction prefabs brought more in line with one another. Another balancing topic I’ve been looking into that also came up in the Discord last week is hydroponics (HYF) vs. conventional farming (FRM). At the moment, HYF is a bit too inefficient, so we will make NS (nutrient solution) a little more affordable. There will also be some additional tweaks to the HYF recipes.

Last but not least, with Presence we will also add a new recipe to HYF! Our APEX PRO user Rubicate made use of the “Design a Commodity” perk. Soon you will be able to use your hydroponics farms to produce mushrooms of the Agaricaceae rubicatii family. What’s more, they won’t even require water as an input material and thus might open up some new possibilities!


Martin

Once again, a very short report from my side: While it’s rare, it happens that things go according to plan. And this week was one of those times. As discussed last week, I wrapped up my client-side work on “item support” for stores and handed over the changes to Michi. He’ll be able to implement the new shipping contracts based on this foundation.

I also spent quite some time on game design calls with Michi and Fabian as well as going over our reworked terms and conditions which we hope to finally get ready for release later this month.


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

Happy trading!

[Mjeno]

Development log #223

This week, the team launched a new job search for a Frontend Web Developer and a UI/UX Designer. Read all about the new positions here!


Martin

As you might know, we searched for and eventually found a frontend developer to help out with Prosperous Universe development in late 2019. He was supposed to start in January, but due to an unfortunate series of events, that didn’t happen and now - almost two months later - he skipped out on us.

Needless to say, this puts us in an unfortunate situation. We more or less wasted several months, postponing the whole project we received funding for in December. And since we are essentially back to square one in our search for a suitable candidate, we also don’t know when we can actually get started on it, let alone finish it.

Anyway…things are as they are and we’ll try to make the best of it as usual. So I invested many hours this week into finding new candidates and I am glad to say that we already got the first bunch of interviews scheduled for next week.

It’s unlikely you haven’t seen them yet, but just in case: You can find out job ads here.

All that aside, I managed to get some rather technical work done on the game itself, namely some tooling and language upgrades. So nothing to write home about.


Michi (molp)

Just a quick update from me this week: I am still working on the server side of the warehouse storage feature. It is now possible to cancel a storage unit and once the last storage unit is canceled the whole store disappears. Canceling a unit will only be allowed if there is still enough free storage available for all things in the inventory and the last storage unit can only be cancelled if it is empty. After that I started to work on the payment process for the weekly rental fees. This is work in progress and I hope I can show you an updated user interface for it next week!


Fabian (Counterpoint)

I’m happy to report that the plans I talked about in the last devlog came to fruition this week. We discussed the direction of the post-Presence release and I’m working on refinements to the high-level concept right now. I also finalized the mentioned balancing changes regarding market maker prices, nutrient solution output and hydroponics recipes, and of course added Rubicate’s mushrooms as a new commodity.

Besides that and as usual, I kept an eye on the community’s “hot topics”, too. This week one of those was the additive nature of production bonuses. After looking into it for a bit, we indeed found them to be quite problematic, especially in more extreme cases. You shouldn’t really be able to run a severely understaffed production line while providing nothing but drinking water to your workforce for example. So you can expect some changes here in the not too distant future (most likely resulting in production bonuses being treated as multipliers instead of flat bonuses).

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

Happy trading!

[Mjeno]

Development log #224

In today’s development log, you can catch a glimpse at what happens when the rental fees for your storage unit are late. Also, simulogics is still looking for a UI/UX designer and a frontend web developer!


Martin

One could sum up my primary activity this week in two letters: HR. I spent a lot of time on interviews with candidates for our open UI/UX design and web development positions. Which is a good thing because it means that we received quite a few applications. This process will likely continue next week and possibly a little bit beyond that as well.

I also did some preparations for the arrival of Julian’s successor next Monday. So yeah… pretty much HR all the way.




Michi (molp)

I finished the warehouse storage feature this week. Although one piece is still missing, it is not vital for the release of the feature and so I decided to start on the shipping contracts and see if there is enough time at the end to finish it as well. Here is a quick screenshot of the current state of the warehouse tile:

As you can see, I changed a few things since I showed it last. The rent unit and cancel unit buttons are now in two separate areas, there is some information about the amount and the receiver of the fee and a countdown that indicates when the next weekly payment of the warehouse rental fee is due. In this particular instance, the player missed the payment (due to missing funds) and the storage unit is now in a locked state as opposed to its normal operational state.

If the fees are not paid, the inventory will be locked until it can be paid. While it is still possible to see the contents of a locked inventory, it is not possible to add or remove any items from it:

Of course the governor of a planet can control the storage rental fee just like the local market and production fees. I added the warehouse rental fee to the local rules LR command.

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

Happy trading!

[NickNack]

Development log #225

In today’s development log, we’re discussing a few issues with bots and possible solutions plus Michi sheds some light on the new shipping contracts feature. Simulogics says goodbye to Julian and hello to Nick!


Nick(NickNack)

Hello licensees! This past week was my first week at simulogics and it has been a wonderful experience so far. The team has been incredibly welcoming and supportive during this transitionary period for Prosperous Universe PR and Community Management. Unlike Julian, I am new to Prosperous Universe and hope that you all will be patient with me as I learn the ins and outs of the game which is already becoming very addictive Just a bit of background info, I’m from the US and recently completed my MBA in Germany. I had always hoped to transition into a marketing role within the video game industry. I’m lucky since simulogics is helping me to achieve that very goal!

This past week I went to HQ in Darmstadt to meet Martin and his family. I had a great day doing onboarding activities and understanding what it meant to be a part of the Prosperous Universe community. I also did a bunch of research into what Julian had been working on and what sort of marketing objectives we needed to focus on. I am gearing up for the Presence release in terms of written content that hopefully you guys will enjoy in the very near future.


Fabian (Counterpoint)

This week I dove back into the “new-player experience” topic. When discussing my early-game findings a couple weeks ago, we decided we’d like to provide a bit more in-game guidance than we currently do to new players. The biggest addition in that area will be what we call a “passive tutorial” that will give you a few “quest” pointers on what you could or should be doing after starting a new game and will also provide additional information matching each task.

While we’ll keep it relatively light-weight and general for now, to a) not make it annoying and b) not risk running into too many conflicts with future changes to the game’s design, this new tutorial approach should provide players with a clearer step-by-step introduction and “just-in-time” information. Oh, and if you’re an APEX veteran already, do not fear! Of course you’ll be able to completely disable the feature in the settings.

Another design topic of the week were “trading fees”, i.e. fees to place or remove orders at the commodity exchanges. You may have heard some complaints recently about botting, or at least bot-like behavior, when it comes to deleting and placing orders on the market, e.g. to always immediately undercut the lowest price by 0.01. While this may seem like a technical and/or community management topic at first sight, we’re actually not too happy with this whole playstyle of “penny undercutting” in general. Even if you’re doing it without a bot, it’s about constantly being online and quick reactions more than about actually coming up with reasonable prices. Therefore I’m currently comparing a few approaches we could take to disincentivize this playstyle as well as using these kinds of bots. At the same time of course, normal gameplay should not suffer under this measure. Expect more details soon!


Michi (molp)

Just another quick update from me this week to save me some time: I am swamped with the work for the upcoming Presence release. I published the release notes earlier this week and they do contain a release date, but please be aware that this is pretty ambitious and we might have to delay the release.

This week was much influenced by the shipping contracts. The implementation in the backend is almost complete and I also finished the UI to setup shipping ads. The visual representation of shipping contracts and their conditions was a relatively simple task in comparison.

Here is the upated LMP command showing the form to create a shipping contract:



Besides the two new fields, origin and destination, it looks like the existing forms to create buy/sell ads. Please note that I also increased the allowed maximum for the delivery time for all types of local market ads.

If a shipping contract is accepted it will have four conditions:

A provision condition where the principal can provision the goods to be transported
A payment condition where the principal pays the hauler for their services
A pickup condition that allows the hauler to pickup the shipment
A delivery condition that allows the hauler to deliver the shipment to its destination
Since the shipment is sealed the contract looks slightly different for the principal and the hauler.

This is the hauler’s perspective, only the weight and volume of the shipment are shown:



.. and the principal’s perspective:



As always: We’d love to hear what you think. Join us on Discord or the forums!

Happy trading!

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

Happy trading!


-------------

Images:

Videos:

[NickNack]

b]Post-Presence Launch Development log #226[/b]

This week in the development log the team discusses initial impressions on the Presence launch, minor fixes to the update, and task prioritization.


Martin

You might have noticed that I didn’t contribute a section to last week’s development log. The reason being that I am essentially drowning in work left and right, most of which isn’t news-worthy. We are (or rather, I am) definitely feeling the effects of growing our team: The time spent screening applications and doing interviews is one thing that hurts the time budget in the short run. But mid- to long-term, there are also a lot of new items on my schedule that simply didn’t exist before. Most of these involve classic “management tasks” like coordinating with team members, legal and admin tasks, giving feedback where it’s requested or just helping out whenever someone gets stuck. More people on the team also means more people requiring the proper tools so they can get their job done. And since I am essentially the company’s “tool smith” these days, high priority change requests that block other team members are increasingly and covertly finding their way onto my to-do list.

All in all, the resulting context switches have been hurting my productivity quite a bit recently, which is why I decided to get “meta” with my schedule and optimize the way I work under these new circumstances. These efforts might turn out to pay off a lot faster than anyone would have anticipated, given that almost the whole team - myself included - is faced with schools and day-cares closing all throughout Germany. You need an iron-clad work plan when you’ve got the kids at home 24/7…


Michi (molp)

Everything was under the banner of the presence release this week. You might have seen in the release notes that I titled the release date as not earlier than March 12th and while this was the first release date we communicated it has been the second one in reality. We wanted to release a week earlier, but there was just too much work to finish in time, and we hadn’t done any tests on our test servers, so we delayed it by a week. Considering that we haven’t had any major technical issues with this release I think it was the right decision to make.

Still, we haven’t managed to implement everything that was on the list for this release. For example warehouses should be expandable, meaning that players can increase the amount of available storage units several times. We can add this functionality later though. Please let us know if your local warehouse runs out of storage units!



Besides this major feature there have been a couple of smaller things that will now be implemented in the next maintenance release. Speaking of which, I will clean up a few things left over from the release and then start with the maintenance release. It will contain quite a few improvements for the (what we call) new player experience. More on that next week


Fabian (Counterpoint)

This week marked the first time I got to witness one of the fabled “named releases” from the inside! It was exciting to see players (and markets) react to the new gameplay possibilities added with Presence. Of course, I couldn’t help but take some notes regarding feedback, suggestions (such as “Piracy plz!”) and things I noticed along the way when fulfilling my first shipping contracts. I also thought of some improvements related to controlling your fleet in general, such as making it easier to find your way around the universe (map) in general, or being able to gage distances without directly using ship flight controls. At some not-too-distant point in the future we are planning to revisit the space flight topic anyway, so all those things will become very relevant then.

During the rest of the week, I dug into various smaller topics, one of which was the potential “trading fee” I mentioned before. My current favored variant is an instant fee upon deleting a ComEx order that will only apply once a company exceeds a specific limit of deletions within a certain time frame. This should cut into some extreme cases, while not interfering with regular day-to-day business that much. We’ll analyze some live-server data to figure out the balancing details soon.

Just to share a couple more examples of ongoing design topics: I started on a list of improvements to the in-game politics. While it’s great to see that governors gained yet another function in tweaking the new storage rental fees, the overall political dynamics are quite bare-bones right now and the decision space is pretty narrow. Apart from that, we’re also thinking about the implications of a (hard or soft) cap on the amount of bases each player can own. The easier it is to become self-sufficient and essentially play a single-player game, the more the trading core of the game will potentially suffer.


Nick (NickNack)

I pretty much devoted all of my time this week into the Presence release. It was quite a fun and entertaining experience for me to witness all what goes into a big update. I was able to write the content for the release page, emails, blogs, forums, and social media which is what I enjoy doing so it made my work hours go by very quickly. Fortunately I was able to finish everything in a timely manner and get to witness players’ reactions online and on Discord. I hope to get more involved in player discussions once I’ve had adequate time with the game and understand its deeper mechanics. So far the Prosperous Universe crowd, both employees and fans, has been a very welcoming and and patient group which is incredibly encouraging for a newcomer like myself. Thank you to everyone who wrote to me directly!

In the coming days (maybe today), I will send out a survey to current players asking them about personal interests and where they spend time online. This information is vital us to as we attempt to find more like-minded players out there that haven’t tried Prosperous Universe. We want to grow this wonderful community so if you have a few minutes to spare please help us out

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

Happy trading!


-------------

Images:

Videos:

[NickNack]

Preparing for New Players - Development Log #227

This week the team discusses the “New Player Experience” as well as Marketing methods of bringing new players to Prosperous Universe.


Nick

This week my objective was to better understand where existing players had come into contact with Prosperous Universe and what these players had in common. Consumer Behavior is huge topic discussed in the Marketing realm but it boils down to understanding your consumer base on a more psychological level and being able to identify the proper channels where new like-minded consumers will come in contact with a product/service. For this reason I sent out a survey asking various questions about how players encountered Prosperous Universe and how they consume media. I am excited to analyze these results and adjust our marketing strategy accordingly. Thanks to all that took the time to answer the survey!

The other topic that I worked on was Search Engine Optimization (SEO). In order for a website to rank better on a search engine (most commonly Google), the website must take into account the most common search terms or ‘keywords’ that will lead people to the site. I looked into two groups of keywords that focused on “space MMO” and “economy simulator” to create an optimal keyword list for Prosperous Universe. I took into account each keyword’s volume (frequency of search) and difficulty (how hard it is to compete against other websites for a given keyword) and arrived at the top 10 “Focus” keywords for our website. It’s a lot of sitting around looking at Excel and manually selecting things but it’s done and I’m pretty pumped to implement the changes on the website to get more hits.


Michi (molp)

One of the major goals of the upcoming maintenance release is to improve the “new player experience”. A while ago Fabian compiled a list of changes that will make the life of new players easier. I began to implement these changes this week. Naturally I started with the company creation and registration screen at the beginning.

I replaced the “starter materials” entry with a list of recommended buildings. That way it is easier to understand what the assortment of starting materials is actually intended for. The handbook link on the right side leads to a specific tutorial now and opens in a new tab. Here is what it looks like now:



In the past, the “starting location” tab had two selectors, one for the starting planet and one for cycling through all available commodity exchanges. Depending on the selection of the commodity exchange, varying market information would be displayed. While this worked well on a technical level it was also confusing for new players. Since the commodity exchange selector used the same yellow layout as the location selector it implied that this was an active choice that had to be done rather than a possibility to get to know the markets.

I replaced the whole lower right component with a simple list of all available commodity exchanges sorted by the distance from the selected starting location. I also added four more hints that are shown at the bottom of the screen depending on the starting location selection. The screen now looks like this:




Fabian (Counterpoint)

I’ll keep it brief this time around since I spent one half of the week continuing to work on a variety of design topics I already mentioned last week, adding improvements and notes to several lists (and merging some of those into others).

For the other half though, Martin and Michi provided me with some new possibilities to extract data from the live worlds. I made use of this data to finalize the design of the trading fee discussed previously, using numbers that make sense given the current live server environment and player behavior.

There was other data that I worked with as well. It held information about the distribution of workforces throughout the universe. Hmm… what could I possibly be doing with this? Well, you’ll probably find out soon enough in a future devlog!

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

Happy trading!


-------------

Videos:

[NickNack]

Update: Populous, First Details - Development Log #228

Exciting news this week as Fabian introduces the new Populous release coming soon and Michi shows off some features of the “New Player Experience” tutorial.


Nick

I want to start by thanking all of you that participated in the survey I mailed out this past week. I really enjoyed reading all the responses and complied the data into a spreadsheet to better understand commonalities between players. There is so much I could go on about since, thankfully, you guys gave me a lot of detail in your responses, which I greatly appreciate. Some interesting findings on the surface level are that many of you are working in IT/Software Development and have similar online and offline habits like gaming subreddits and rock climbing (!)

Apart from looking at the survey results and adjusting my marketing strategy this week, I also spoke with the amazingly talented Prosperous Turnip group about turning some of their work into content that is sharable across social media channels. I think they were very positive about the idea and I look forward to working with them and churning out some really cool and enjoyable user-generated content.


Michi (molp)

First of all, you might have noticed that my response time to questions in the Discord or forums has been longer than usual. This is because I am currently taking a day off each week to mitigate the biggest impact (at least for me) of the Corona curfew, namely the shutdown of all daycare facilities. With the remaining time I try to focus on development issues.

Speaking of which, the work on the “New Player Experience” continues! Fabian has specified what we call the passive tutorial. It is a list of tasks that will be presented to a new player once they open APEX for the first time. The tasks are made up in a way that most of APEX’ basic functionality is covered. Here is a first work-in-progress screenshot of the revamped HELP command:



Clicking on a task will open the corresponding command or website. Sometimes clicking a task is enough to mark it as done, other times (for example with Base building) the task is marked as done once the corresponding action has been performed. The progress of the passive tutorial is shown in the top row:



Once deployed every licensee, no matter if new or experienced player, will see this tutorial. We will add an option to disable this feature though.


Fabian (Counterpoint)

I pretty much focused on one single topic this week: our next named release. “Populous”, as you may be able to guess from the name, is all about planetary populations. To keep them tightly connected to the existing gameplay, they won’t be an entirely new entity, but rather a part of a planet’s total workforce. However, we will transform workers from being a mere number into something more human-like with their own needs you need to satisfy. No longer will workers simply “appear” with new production buildings, but a planet’s population will fluctuate over time depending on the planetary infrastructure provided.

By doing this, we hope to make population more meaningful overall and strengthen the sense of cooperation among players on the same planet. There’ll be many new resource sinks and a lot of (multiplayer) decision-making involved when it comes to deciding what to build, which workforce tier is the most important to care for etc. Also, in the long-term, we’d like to create incentives for veteran players to find new opportunities on untapped planets, so they don’t have to “share” a fully settled planet’s population as much.

On top of that, planetary populations will be fertile ground for the future of the game as well. For example, opportunities to introduce new political systems such as immigration campaigns and interplanetary migration emerge quite directly from the feature. You can also easily imagine a potential exploration system being tied to sending part of your population out to explore new areas of the universe, thus not being able to use them as part of your workforce during that time and the remaining population’s mood depending partially on the outcome of that mission.

That’s stuff for the further future though. For now we’ll focus on the first step, i.e. introducing a per-planet population to begin with, including needs and need priorities, happiness, growth and decline, and a host of new buildable infrastructure. As you can hopefully see, this is quite an ambitious feature that’ll have a significant impact on how the game plays. It’ll be a lot of work to get done and surely take some tweaking over time to get where we want it to be. However, we think it’ll totally be worth it, make things more interesting in the short run and also open up huge amounts of potential for the future. Naturally, you can expect to read more about “Populous” in future devlogs!


Martin

Besides fixing a few server hick-ups at the beginning of the week (which turned out to be a configuration issue caused by us upgrading to the latest version of our cluster management system) and some work on non-visible technical features that will go into the next maintenance patch, there isn’t much to report from my side this week.

But there is one happy thing I can announce: We finally wrapped up the hiring process for our open UI/UX position. If you are a regular reader of the devlogs you might remember that we had filled this position before, just for the respective candidate to leave us out in the rain earlier this year. So I won’t jinx it again by naming names or anything. Just the info that if everything goes according to plan, the new person will start in July, which finally marks the official kick-off for the huge UI project we got funding for. Exciting times!

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

Happy trading!


-------------

Videos:

[NickNack]

Pacifying Your Populous - Development log #229

The team sheds more light on the upcoming release Populous focusing on how your planet’s inhabitants might need incentives to stay put.


Nick

This week I focused on PR strategies and SEO for the Prosperous Universe homepage. I hope to implement these changes this week and track if there is an increase or decrease in traffic moving forward.

On a more interesting note, I contacted the extremely talented group at Prosperous Turnip on turning some of their content into shareable articles that can be distributed through social media channels. What we were really lacking was some kind of visual representation that would capture viewer’s attention before reading. I decided to sharpen my artistic skills and downloaded Inkscape to create some kind of amateur art. I selected the article about Michi essentially being the creator of the universe and finding stone tablets in a Moses-like origin story. I was able to bring the hilarity to life with an image that I will be sharing this week. One notable point of contention was the design of Michi’s hair which went through three different edits before being approved by the Turnip staff.


Michi (molp)

IThe work on the “new player experience” continued this week. I put on finishing touches on the revamped HELP command after Fabian tested it and provided valuable feedback. I then went on to the next issue in the series: the PLI command. It is one of the first commands a new player will see and I think it is one of the most used commands to explore the game world. Hence we wanted improve a few things:

There are new descriptive tooltips for almost all entries
I added the material icons to the resources part, that was actually a suggestion from a player, so thank you!
The basic planetary properties gravity, temperature, pressure are now combined into one entry, just as the planet’s resources. I also added the actual values, as well as a indicator bar that shows if a parameter is within a tolerable range or if special building materials are necessary
Here is a screenshot showing two different planets:




Fabian (Counterpoint)

As announced last week, right now I’m in full-on “Populous” mode. This means defining a whole bunch of behaviors, formulas and an initial balancing for the new planetary population feature.

One core aspect of it lies in fulfilling a set of needs. Each planet’s population will have a specific mix of requirements depending on how many workers of each tier are present. Each tier’s happiness will depend on whether their needs are being met by the planet’s infrastructure. So scientists for example will require some high-level educational infrastructure to spawn in the first place and also to want to stay on the planet long-term. Settlers on the other hand might be more concerned (and content) with their general safety.

This means there will be quite a few new planetary infrastructure projects, some of which focus on fulfilling one single need, while others may fulfill multiple needs at once but not quite to the same extent. Deciding which projects to go for at which point will not be trivial and require some careful (cooperative) planning.

In any case, while we’re at introducing all these new kinds of buildings, we’d like to use this opportunity to also extend and tweak the material tree a bit. So, together with Martin and Michi, we’ve been doing some brainstorming regarding potential new commodities that could be used as building or upkeep materials or be a part of whole new supply chains.

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

Happy trading!


-------------

Videos:

[NickNack]

Easing in the Newbies - Development log #230

The team talks about a variety of topics this week including new planetary projects, aspects for helping new players assimilate into the game, art ideas, and investor dealings.


Nick

I finally implemented the SEO changes on the website and will be monitoring them throughout the week to see if there are any positive or negative changes in terms of web traffic. My hope is to also add more content to the website in terms of boosting SEO and from a UX perspective like an image of past and future releases that will highlight how far the game as come since its original inception. I also reworked the press release information in order to be ready for new PR contacts once Populous is ready.

The amateur artwork for the Prosperous Turnip was posted on Twitter and Facebook and I had to rework the background for Twitter since it only allows you to post in a landscape frame. I talked with Michi about doing some WWII/Cold War poster styled art for an interesting/not too difficult design-wise for social media channels. I’m working on a new image as of writing this and I’m excited to incorporate this new theme and improve my digital art making skills!


Michi (molp)

I finished all outstanding tasks on the “new player experience” change list. The last two tickets were about the address selector and the list of production orders.

When you start out in the game and ask other players how to buy things or how to make money the answer will most likely contain the tip to fly to a commodity exchange. While this is a pretty forward thing to do for experienced players it is way harder for newbies. The reason for this is, that you first have to acquire the address of the commodity exchange and then type it into the destination field in the SFC command. Wouldn’t it be easier if one could just click on the comex’ address somewhere without typing it? Meet the new address selector! Besides the search results from typing in partial addresses it now also has three more sections with the addresses of your bases, warehouses and the three commodity exchanges. Here is an example:



Some buildings have a lot of different recipes and finding the right one can be tricky. We decided to add a product filter as an additional (but optional) step to select a production template. The product filter allows to narrow down the available production templates to a list that only contains the corresponding products. It looks like this:



Besides these additions I also worked on a ticket that will change how the efficiency factors in the production lines work: From now on all efficiency factors will be multiplicative. In the past the efficiency factors have been added to the base efficiency value of the workforce. Now they will be multiplied with the base value. This will move the focus even more towards keeping the workforces satisfied.


Fabian (Counterpoint)

This week was primarily focused on two tasks surrounding “Populous” for me. The first was continuing to collect ideas regarding the new planetary infrastructure. We have a pretty good idea of the kinds of needs we’re going for, but aren’t 100% decided on the specific planetary projects. Some of them are pretty set in stone, for example there’ll probably be police stations, fire brigades and hospitals in one form or another. Others, especially when it comes to non-essential comfort and culture, are more elusive. We’ve been throwing around anything from Wellness Centers, to Arcades, Art Cafés and 4D Cinemas, each with their own implications on the resulting building and upkeep materials of course.

The other major task was transferring the whole population concept (at least its mathematical side) into a spreadsheet format. While text documents make a lot of sense (to me at least) for high-level concepts and laying out the design reasoning, they become quite unwieldy once you’re starting to tweak the details, values and formulas across dozens of sections and subsections. As a nice side effect, I think the spreadsheet will give Martin und Michi a much more efficient overview of things for when they start implementing it all later down the line, too.


Martin

With hiring-related stuff out of the way, I finally got around to do a bit of programming, just to be immediately pulled away from it again. Our plan was to only start working on the UI project we got funding for once all respective position were filled and the new people actually started to work for us. That’s currently scheduled to happen in early July. But technically, the project has been going on since mid-December and therefore we have to do the necessary paperwork now already. That’s the difference between a private and a public investor: The former is interested in how the money is spent, the latter is interested in that it is spent. Although a bit strange, I am happy to comply as long as it means that we are able to pay for the new positions we created which in turn will allow us to crank up the UI/UX qualities of the game to 11 starting later this year!

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

Happy trading!


-------------

Videos:

[NickNack]

Outage Woes and Design Ideas Development log #232

In this week’s log the team discusses issues encountered from the newly released maintenance patch and some brainstorming ideas for the upcoming Populous release’s design.


Nick

With the release of the maintenance patch last week I was busy contacting around 50+ journalist contacts in hopes that they will write an article or feature Prosperous Universe in some way on popular game sites. This is very time consuming since sending copy-paste spam emails is an easy way to get ignored. I focused my efforts on selecting journalists that had already written about topics that can be related to our game and wrote them each a personalized email pitching an idea for an article. I hope to get some responses which would aid greatly in spreading the word and generating new players.

I was also able to almost finish the next image that I talked about before taking inspiration from an old war poster from the WWII/Cold War era. I’m excited to share it on social media so be on the look out for it soon! I’m happy with the way it turned out and I am getting more and more acquainted with Inkscape so hopefully it will start taking less time to pump these out.


Michi (molp)

As most of you experienced over the last few days, last week’s maintenance update didn’t go as well as we’d hoped. While the new features and changes worked as intended we quickly realized that we have a memory issue. Unfortunately finding the cause turned out to be much harder than we thought and since APEX is running on multiple servers in a distributed environment didn’t make it easier at all. The short term solution was to reboot the machines every couple of hours. This graph of the concurrent users shows it pretty well:



Every time it shows a white line instead of the green line the servers were either down or not available. To add insult to injury one of the configuration changes we made didn’t go as expected and changed the password of the database without letting other services know and effectively locked us out. Martin fixed this issue in a long and exhausting coding session on Saturday afternoon. Eventually the configuration changes fixed the issue and the servers are up and running since then. Let’s hope it stays that way.

I really want to express my gratitude to the players, a lot of you tried to help or waited very patiently for APEX to become available again!


Fabian (Counterpoint)

Last week we had another design call about our next named update “Populous”. Apart from a few leftover details that I’ll dive into this week, the concept is ready. This means planning for the actual implementation can begin. We want to make sure to get a testable model running as soon as possible in the process, just to question the assumptions made and run some long-term simulations a spreadsheet can’t really handle all that well. I’m sure there’ll be many more tweaks, but I’m excited to see this move forward!

Of course, besides the overall systems part, there’s also the content. Throughout last week, I consolidated many of Martin’s, Michi’s and my ideas regarding the new infrastructure projects and what they could be made of. This involves many new commodities as well, so the next step is to think about what they consist of, trying to find (ideally industry-spanning) connections between between the different projects, and even creating some whole new supply chains. At this point I only have a very rough balancing in mind for all this. I’d rather shift or cut certain ideas later on instead of not having them in the first place. So I’ll worry about the details when we get there.

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

Happy trading!


-------------

Videos:

[NickNack]

Playing Politics - Development Log #233

As Populous inches ever closer to release, Fabian takes a look at the political future of the game and Michi returns to development after fixing tons of bugs.


Nick

Most of my time this week went into follow up emails for the journalists I wrote last week. It was a bit deflating to not hear back but April was a very gaming-heavy press month with some very huge releases across the industry. I will have to rework my press strategy a bit and try to branch out of the gaming press and into other areas like sci-fi and economics.

I also finalized some content ideas for the homepage relating to both SEO and UI/UX that I can hopefully implement sooner rather than later. Some of it I know will have to wait until our new hire starts in July but that is not so far away now. If you are reading this, please make sure you’re following our social media accounts (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram) for some cool content coming soon!


Michi (molp)

After all the outages and bug hunting of last week I was really eager to get into actual development again. I started with the design document Fabian has written for the Populous release and translated it into a list of implementation tasks. After that I immediately started to implement the first task.

Fabian and I decided that it would probably be best to implement the core of the population simulation independently from the rest of the game. That way testing the population model is way easier than firing up a local instance of the game and clicking through all the (not yet existing) UI elements and waiting for things to happen. I am currently writing a simple command line tool that takes a few input parameters (like initial population size, workforce requirements of the players and so on) and generates a CSV file with the population development over several week-long iterations. Fabian can then take the CSV file and import it into his favorite spreadsheet/BI program.

So far I’ve only managed to implement the very first of several steps of the population simulation, but I am confident that I will be making progress next week.


Fabian (Counterpoint)

The work on “Populous” continued pretty much as announced last week. Michi is implementing a testing environment for the core population model, while we’re still generating and sorting through lots of ideas on the content side of things. Now, I talked quite a bit about the new population system in general already, so for this devlog I’d like to muse about the (perhaps distant) future a bit.

One of the parts of the concept that we’ll have to see if it makes the initial release, but definitely has a lot of potential, is its connection to politics. Currently Governors have relatively few options and elections are mostly just based on minimizing all the fees and being active in-game so people know your name. In the future we of course want to expand on this and “Populous”, since it concerns a planet as a whole, will give us several new levers to do so.

You can easily imagine a governor being responsible for running certain campaigns to e.g. boost immigration or increase happiness (at least temporarily). On top of that, educational programs immediately come to mind as well to improve upon a planet’s ability to generate engineers and scientists. We’re also thinking about other ideas such as governors influencing the workforce distribution in certain ways (fair ways of course).

This means planetary populations could give governors the ability to actually use all these fees collected by their corporation to (transparently) invest them back in the planet’s future. Also, all the other players on the planet would be able to use the population’s development and statistics to judge whether the actions of their governor make sense. This in turn would open up the possibility of much more interesting electoral campaigns with actual political “programs”, plans being laid out, promises being made and so on.

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

Happy trading!


-------------

Videos:

[NickNack]

Keeping Up With Your Populous - Development Log #234

Fabian provides some insight with how the upkeep system will work once Populous hits and Michi explains how keeping your workforce happy is the key to success.


Martin

Besides a few calls with the rest of team, the focus of my work this week was on our other project AirlineSim. For years now, Prosperous Universe has been the top priority for the company and consequently, AirlineSim received little love despite being an important source of revenue for us. So it was about time for me to invest some time there, partly to work on an upcoming maintenance patch, partly to start preparing a road-map for future developments. Another reason I am doing this now is that we expect an enourmous amount of work to pile up once our new frontend guy starts feeding the development backlog in July. Therefore I am trying to get as many non-Prosperous Universe stuff out of the way as I can, so expect fewer and less interesting updates from me over the coming weeks.


Michi (molp)

This week I’ve been solely working on the core of the new planetary population model. It consists of many small steps and basically calculates how much the population of each workforce group grows or declines.

The model has several input parameters, and the most obvious is probably the current workforce population. Each kind of workforce has different needs that can be categorized into life support, safety, health, comfort, culture and education. These needs are fulfilled by planetary infrastructure that is build and kept running by the planet’s site owners. There will be several infrastructure projects for each workforce need and each of them can be ‘leveled up’ to provide for a larger population. Life support is an exception here: on a habitable planet the life support is a given, on unhabitable planets it is provided by the habitations in the player bases.

All these input parameters are combined and eventually lead to a growth, stagnation or decline of the workforces. However, the engineer and scientist workforce is exempt from this growth, they can only grow through a mechanism we call population shift. At the end of each simulation step a fraction of each workforce will be promoted to the next higher workforce (technicians to engineers for example) if their happiness is large enough. So to grow a population of engineers the players will have to keep their technicians satisfied and provide infrastructure for the engineers.

I did not finish the model yet, but at least I reached the last two simulation steps


Fabian (Counterpoint)

Last week we had some discussions about the details of how the upkeep system of the new planetary infrastructure should work when we introduce “Populous”. My first intuition was to move away from the fraction-based expenses we have had with workforce consumables and create a more transparent and discrete system. After all, we don’t really need to be concerned about rounding effects too much when it comes to population infrastructure, because they’ll be built and run by all players on a planet together.

What we’ll try to do is have upkeep materials of different categories, each with its own “ticking timer”. Some materials will be “fast”, which means a certain amount from the infrastructure’s storage will get used up every day. Others will be “slow” and may only need a couple of units once per week. Of course a lot depends on the final balancing details still. For example, we’ll need to figure out exactly how many of those categories we’ll need. We don’t want to create more than we necessarily have to and keep things as easy to understand as we can.

In other news, but also related to that same “transparency” principle (and to last week’s devlog), I’m also working on mocking up a new governor information screen centered all around population, the efficiency of the existing infrastructure and so on. After all, governors should be able to make good (or bad) decisions and call the shots based on actual data rather than just gut feelings.

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

Happy trading!


-------------

Videos: