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[NickNack]

Experimental Behavior - Development log #235

Michi and Fabian discuss using a tool to simulate the workforce behavior output for the upcoming Populous release and Nick gets a new PR contact.


Nick

After weeks upon weeks of emailing, I finally got a response from a site that has a pretty decent EVE community blog that is interested in writing about Prosperous Universe. I’m excited that I at least got one response from the pool of journalists that I’ve been contacting. I knew it would be pretty difficult in the beginning to find the right contacts but as I get the formula down, it will become easier and easier. It’s nice to finally get this PR ball moving!

Thanks to those of you that liked the Ironforge image I created and posted on social media. If you haven’t see it please consider dropping a like on Twitter. Moving forward in the visuals department, I want to create another “Planet” themed image and will make a poll in Discord and ask which planet people would like to see next. I have also started making a “Release Roadmap” image that will cover past and future milestones for the game.


Michi (molp)

Early last week I created the mockups for the extended governor screens mentioned in the last devlog and played around with quite a few test cases in Michi’s population simulation tool. These experiments actually didn’t reveal anything fundamentally broken yet in the core model of Populous. Of course “real-world” live server conditions are a different beast, but so far so good.

Besides that, I “finalized” the preliminary list of new planetary infrastructure projects, new buildings and upkeep materials and other products. We’re still iterating on a few of them, but the overall plan stands. The next step I’m working on right now is to get all of those set up in our world builder tool that calculates rough complexity values based on a product’s position in the tech tree.

I’m sure there’ll be lots of back and forth between this step and tweaking the actual final list, but after all there should be around 50 new materials in the game. I’m excited to witness their impact on the economy already!


Fabian (Counterpoint)

I continued to work on the Populous release this week and wrote some instrumentation to help identify the current performance problems.

The core of the population simulation is finished now. All simulation steps are implemented and I created a simple command line tool for Fabian to play around with the model. The tool allows testing arbitrary initial situations and can simulate the population development over many weeks. It then outputs a large CSV file containing the simulation’s intermediate and final results. Using a CSV file allows to import it into any spreadsheet app and quickly analyze the outputs. Since it runs completely independent of our server code Fabian is able to quickly test various scenarios without booting up the whole game.

Besides the work on populous I also created instrumentation to find the root cause of the recent performance problems. Some of you might have noticed that we regularly need to restart single nodes or the whole cluster to keep it running and that is by no means how we intend to run the game Usually this happens during our off-hours, and so we might not immediately notice the performance degradation leaving the players with a laggy or even unavailable game. We are sorry about that and hopefully will gain some vital insights into the problem this week.

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

Happy trading!


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Videos:

[NickNack]

Problem Solving #236

Due to the German holiday this past week, our discussion is a bit shorter than usual. Nevertheless, Michi has given us some great insight concerning the performance issues that were fixed and Nick delves into player psychology and more content creation.



Michi (molp)

Good news everyone! The performance problems are solved (for now). In essence there have been two major problems:

If you follow our dev blog you might already know that we are using an actor based architecture in the backend. Every actor, for example a company, has multiple behaviors, each responsible for a different part of the actor. Examples are the accounting behavior, fleet behavior, base behavior and so on. Actors store their state as events in the database and when they wake up they go through all of their events and recreate the state of their behaviors.

Since this test was never intended to run this long we didn’t bother to optimize the behaviors memory-wise. Up until recently each behavior would just keep all the data that was being read from the database. For example: if a company had thousands of notifications accumulated over time, all of them were kept in memory, even though they are just dead weight.

We quickly realized that this could be a major factor of the performance issue and tried to solve this. Instead of going through hundreds of behaviors and try to figure out which of them could accumulate dead weight, we tried to do that programmatically by measuring the behavior’s memory footprint. I tried several methods to do this, but it turned out to be more difficult than I anticipated. Most of the solutions just made the problem worse by an order of magnitude. Eventually we resorted to the manual way: we identified the three most promising behaviors, implemented means to get rid of unused data and that reduced the overall memory footprint by more than a third.

The second problem was a bit trickier to detect, since it didn’t leave any trails in our logs. When a company liquidates, all behaviors receive a callback, basically asking them to clean up. The local market behavior for example deletes all LM ads and once this is done the COLIQ can continue. To delete a LM ad a transaction with the local market actor is opened and in this particular case it failed, since the local market actor could not find the ad that should be deleted. This caused an endless loop since the local market behavior on the company side tried again and again. To make it even worse, transactions store events in the database, so this behavior was writing huge amounts of events to the database, consuming memory and of course lots of CPU time.

With these problems solved now I finally can resume my work on the Populous release


Nick

This week was spent planning for new content and research on who the “perfect Prosperous Universe adopter” is. For both SEO and website design, I will be creating a Release Roadmap to showcase where Prosperous Universe came from, where it is now, and a glimpse at what is to come. I think this will be a really cool asset to have and share with the core audience. It has involved going through past devlogs and forum posts to see which Alphas were important and what features were added. It has given me a unique perspective on what the game was like in the past and how far along it has come.

Another thing I have been working on is called the HALO Strategy, which gives us insight into the hopes, dreams, fears, and barriers for our “dream adopter.” Although Prosperous Universe is for everyone, there are certain qualities and preferences that many of our players share, which is what marketing is all about: connecting to the right people. It is interesting delving into the player psychology and taking a look at what parts of the game resonate best with our audience. I am also thinking about contacting some players for interviews. Reach out to me if you would like to participate!

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

Happy trading!


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Videos:

[NickNack]

Populous: Full Steam Ahead - Development log #237

With the release of Populous inching ever closer, Michi details how population and workforce will be integrated while Fabian explains the effects of planetary projects on your populous. Only one more month until our new team member arrives!


Martin

As mentioned a few weeks ago, I am busy getting as many small- to medium-sized tasks out of the way before July. Right now this includes improving our in-game analytics, so Fabian (among others) has more hard data to work with when designing new and evaluating existing features. Only five more weeks before the new guy arrives!


Michi (molp)

With last weeks’ performance issues gone I could finally focus on the Populous release again.

This week I started by integrating the stand-alone population simulation into the server code. That means that I made sure every planet will get its own population and that this population will be initialized with the planet’s total workforce. The actual population simulation will happen every 7 days. The result of the simulation contains a lot of useful information, but first and foremost it tells us how much the population has grown or declined within the simulation period.

The next major step will be the distribution of the workforce. Right now every company has its own workforce that it can use to operate its production lines. This changes with Populous. After the population simulation the planetary workforce will be distributed evenly between all base owners of the planet.

Maybe you saw my message in Discord: I deployed the first code of Populous to the servers this week. For the distribution mechanism to work the population needs to know how many of each workforce type a company needs and for how many it has housing for. This information is regularly sent from the companies to the population, and we start to aggregate the data now, so it is available once the release goes live.

More on the distribution mechanism in a coming devlog!


Fabian (Counterpoint)

Last week I continued my journey into the depths of our internal material tree editor tool to integrate all the new products that will be introduced with Populous, as well as all their recipes and the planetary infrastructure projects with their initial building costs. These building costs will increase for higher levels of the projects of course, so creating a first balancing draft of leveling up costs was the next item on my list.

Once you manage to build an infrastructure project though, it’ll not automatically start fulfilling your population’s needs. The other thing you need to keep track of is each project’s upkeep. Certain materials will be consumed daily, others once a week, but all of them need to be present on the project’s own upkeep storage to make it run at full efficiency. Upkeep for bigger projects that provide more fulfillment will be significantly more expensive of course, while the smaller projects have to stay manageable for planets with fewer players or ones that are just starting to grow. Also, infrastructure that’s more important to higher-level workforces (such as universities) in general comes with more complex upkeep materials as well. With the rough balancing in place, I’ll now go back to running some more simulations and thought experiments on how this whole thing might play out.

Oh, and I should also mention that I had a design call with Michi last week about a feature that’ll be a very significant quality-of-life improvement, especially for veteran players with lots of bases and lots of buildings!


Nick

I wanted to start by saying thank you to those of you who volunteered to be interviewed for my player psychology project. It really means a lot and speaks volumes about the great community we have here. I am looking forward to diving into the mindset of dedicated PrUn players and seeing what common elements I can pull together to create our “perfect adopter” framework. I also wanted to give a shoutout to GDP who welcomed me into their Discord chat for this experiment.

I also was able to almost finalize our “Release Roadmap” image for both SEO and social media purposes. I think it is turning out really well so I am excited to show it to you guys (hopefully this week). I am also organizing some behind-the-scenes footage of the team to share on social channels so players can have some faces to associate with the game development. If you are interested in seeing us, make sure you follow on Twitter and Instagram! By the way, the winner of the poll for the next artwork is Montem; thanks to everyone that voted. I will do a poll again after finishing the next image so don’t fret if your favorite planet did not get chosen.

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

Happy trading!


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Videos:

[NickNack]

The Personnel Touch - Development log #238

Everyone’s happy on their first day, but they might not stay that way! Fabian explains how the workforce simulation will take it easy in the beginning while you spruce up your infrastructure./i]


Nick

Last week I was able to conduct a few surveys with players for my “Player Psychology” project and have gotten some really interesting results. I shared my first findings with the team and we all agreed that so far it sounds very spot on for many of our PrUn players. I will be looking at more data and compiling into one coherent paragraph detailing many traits and behaviors of our “Ideal PrUn Player.” Thanks again to those of you that volunteered; I couldn’t have done it without you guys!

I hope you guys are following us on social media, like on Twitter, because there’s been a few cool postings and more to come! I finalized the Release Roadmap and Prosperous Turnip logo, which I think both turned out really well. I will be posting more frequently thanks to the logo and this week I’ll start on the Montem image (the poll winner!). If you guys have any interesting facts/stories about Montem, send me a message and I might be able to incorporate something into the image.


Michi (molp)

We simulate the planet’s population growth and decline every seven days. Every type of workforce grows and declines depending on the fulfillment of their needs. After a simulation is finished all inhabitants of a planet get a notification leading to the population report. Below is an early work-in-progress screenshot of that report.


As you can see the current population and the change over the last seven days period is the most important information . The happiness of a workforce depends on the fulfillment of its needs, the current unemployment rate and the happiness of previous periods is also taken into account.

A large unemployment rate is an indicator that the population exceeds the workforce requirements of the bases’ production lines. A low unemployment rate is desirable, a non-existing one might lead to a situation where not every base gets the workforces they requested.


Fabian (Counterpoint)

Last week I jumped back into Michi’s “population simulation tool”, experimented with certain setups of workforces and infrastructure and created a bunch of charts given different starting situations. My intention was mostly to develop a feel for how planetary populations may develop in-game over the weeks (even though there are a whole bunch of additional and more dynamic factors that’ll come into play in “real life”). In general, the model works and is able to reasonably handle and respond to a variety of situations. I took note of a few things I’d like to keep an eye on in our further development and tests though, such as the in many situations rather slow speed of engineer and scientist growth, or the generally very moderate decline of unhappy workforces (and especially pioneers). The latter is intended to an extent of course, also because we don’t want to cut down super harshly on existing planetary workforces in our pretty “mature” universe.

Speaking of which, some players have been worried that they’ll lose massive amounts of workers once Populous hits. Rest assured that this is very much on our radar and we will make sure there’s enough of a “transitioning phase” so you can get the new infrastructure up and running in time. On that note, we do have a mechanism in our concept called “Explorer’s Grace”, which adds a pretty significant bonus to a population’s happiness for a good while if they’re settling on a previously untouched planet. So one option would be to just apply this bonus to all inhabited planets initially when we release the update. Of course, this mechanism also hints at a potential future of the game including actual “exploration” with super cool planets to discover far from where you start out and all that.

Anyways, that’s far-future stuff. The rest of last week was about starting my research on closer-future post-Populous things though, which I’ll continue this week as well.

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

Happy trading!


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Videos:

[NickNack]

Enlisting Labor - Development log #239

This week Michi teaches us how workers are distributed among the bases and how worker reserve pools will function. Nick gears up for Asteroid Day which comes at the end of the month!

Michi (molp)

This week I finished the integration of the planetary population with the local workforce.

Up until now every base had exactly the workforce it required to run the production lines given that there is enough habitation space. If one added a new production building the required workforce would go up and if it is equal or below the capacity the workforces would just be there.

This behavior changes with the Populous release. Every week when a new population report is generated the planetary population is being distributed among all bases of the planet. Whenever a production building is constructed or demolished and when the habitation capacity changes the base silently sends a workforce request to the population. During the distribution of the workforce the requests are evenly spread among the bases, meaning that every base gets a tiny slice of the workforce until its capacity limit is reached or no planetary workforce is left.

Below is a screenshot that shows one of the effects the new system has:



In the back you can see the current population report: Vallis has more than 600 pioneers. The buffer below shows the workforce overview of our base. We have capacity for 200 pioneers, we require 200 pioneers for the production lines but the current population is only 100. How can that be? Just before taking the screenshot I added a new basic material plants that increased the number of required pioneers from 100 to 200. A workforce request is being sent to the planetary population, but not filled immediately because the workforce distribution only happens once a week.

To mitigate this we have another feature planned called “worker reserve pool”. It is a simple pool of workforces that are not distributed as described above, but kept for situations where players build new production buildings. If the pool still has workforces left they are assigned to the base immediately. Ideally the governor of a planet can set the size of the reserve pool, choosing between keeping the unemployment rate low and not frustrating the inhabitants of a planet with low workforce reserves. More on that feature in a later devlog.


Nick

I hope you guys were able to see the Release Roadmap I tweeted out this week! I got a lot of positive feedback so thanks to everyone who liked and shared! I am also extremely excited to share with you guys about our Asteroid Day campaign. Not only will we have some amazing new artwork from Mac Rebisz but we are also planning something special, more details to come very soon!

On a completely different marketing topic, I have been doing some ad strategy research and came across the topic of “High Value Content Offer” or HVCO. Basically the strategy is used to warm up your cold leads that come from Google/Facebook that did not specifically search for our game but may be somewhat interested. Instead of immediately asking them to pay or even play our game, we would deliver some quality content that answers their burning questions related to economics, space, etc. This gives them an idea of what they can experience by being a part of our game and community without pressuring them to play.

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

Happy trading!


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Videos:

[NickNack]

Planes, Prizes, and Population Projects - Development Log #240

It’s a big news week for PrUn as Michi discusses Population Infrastructure Projects, Fabian talks first details on ship building (!!!) and Nick announces an Asteroid Day giveaway!


Nick

Some of you might already be aware but Asteroid Day is next week on June 30th. The purpose of Asteroid Day is to raise awareness for asteroids that could potentially cause destruction to the Earth and find ways to protect ourselves in case such an event should happen. Prosperous Universe has been a participant for the past few years and this year we will be doing a giveaway to help raise awareness!

I will post on social media tomorrow all the details but I will spill the beans here and let you know that we will be giving away a Prosperous Universe-themed T-shirt!I know not all of you have social media accounts but please think about asking a friend to enter for you as we are also wanting to grow our social media presence online. I’m very excited about this as I love doing giveaways and drumming up some hype! Keep your eyes peeled on Twitter.


Michi (molp)

Last week I did go into detail how the workforce distribution system works and explained that the worker reserve pool is still missing. I decided to take a break from the distribution mechanism and did work on something else: population infrastructure projects! Please keep in mind that the screenshots below are work in progress!

With the Populous update we will introduce a new planetary project called Population infrastructure. Unlike the other projects it has no building costs associated and will be available on every planet from the get-go:



Its purpose is to administrate 14 sub-projects that are relevant to the population. Clicking on a project will open a new command called POPI (population infrastructure) that has a list of all sub-projects:



Each of these projects fulfills one or more population needs. These are Safety, Health, Comfort, Culture and Education. Each project has a certain level and can be upgraded up to 10 times. For example on a small planet a Safety Station may be enough to fulfill the population’s safety need. Larger populations might need an additional Security Drone Post. Clicking on details will open another new command POPID (population infrastructure details) showing the details for a project:





Fabian (Counterpoint)

As you may know from Nick’s super cool roadmap tweet, we’re planning to introduce ship building in an update later this year. Obviously “more ships for everyone” is too easy of an answer on how to go about doing that. So we’ve been discussing a lot of questions regarding the ship flight model, the differences between ships in terms of their basic parameters as well as “special abilities” they may have.

This in turn is strongly connected to the design of the universe map in general, which probably needs to become way more specific and granular in terms of which system are (easily) accessible with different kinds of ships and so on.

Now, while we will have to introduce some amount of additional complexity here, we also can’t do everything at once and want to focus on the aspects with the most impact on the overall gameplay first. Custom 3D ship designs with their own editor for example are an idea we love, but which naturally falls into a later stage of development, when the overall feature is in place.

So, right now I’m moving from the big initial collection of rough ideas towards the first more concrete specifications of the update itself. As usual, we’ll keep you posted!
As always: we’d love to hear what you think: join us on Discord or the forums!

Happy trading!


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Videos:

[NickNack]

Permission to Come Aboard - Development log #242

An unusual yet special week has come to an end. The mic was passed to Martin for the rundown.


Martin

You know something’s up when I get to write a devlog all by myself…

Readers of this blog might be aware of the fact that we applied for and received a grant from the German government in late 2019. Ever since we’ve been looking for new team members, a process that had its ups and downs: While Fabian joined us in January already, filling the game design position, another candidate left us hanging literally at the last minute. Fabian, Michi and myself were waiting in a meeting room for “number four”, only to receive a message that he wouldn’t show. We wasted several weeks trying to remedy the situation before giving up and starting from scratch. This meant that the search for the “frontend developer/designer” position dragged on for several more months, postponing the official launch of the project for which we received the funding. We finally signed a new contract in late March but didn’t want to jinx it this time and kept the news mostly under wraps.

Now I can reveal the secret: With both excitement and relief, I am happy to announce that as of this July, Manoj joins us officially as a UI/UX designer!

I am also able to finally reveal what he and the rest of the team will be working on: His primary project bears the working title “Prosperous Universe Mobile”!

To fulfil the selection criteria of the funding program, we had to find a self-contained project to propose. A generic more-work-on-PrUn wasn’t an option, so after some discussion we decided that the most effective use of the additional funds would be as a visual overhaul of the existing web app combined with a dedicated UI for small screens. The reasoning behind this was that only the external funding could allow for us to create a dedicated position just for frontend design, presenting completely new opportunities.

We won’t be creating any native apps, the mobile UI will be browser-based just like the existing application. But we know that a lot of you have been asking for better touch support for a long time and I hope you are as excited as I am about the fact that it’s finally coming! With Manoj working on this pretty much full-time for at least the next 12 months, we’re convinced we’ll see some impressive results soon.

And we’ve already started: Last week, the whole of the Prosperous Universe team came together in Darmstadt to discuss first steps and to get to know each other. There’s even photographic proof:



So once again: Welcome on board, Manoj!

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

Happy trading!


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[NickNack]

Operation iPrUn Has Begun - Development log #243

Manoj shares the first sketches of Prosperous Universe Mobile, Michi tolls away at Populous, and Fabian has more ship building deets!


Manoj

Hi, I’m Manoj, the new guy who was just launched into this Prosperous Universe. There is a better story about me here!

Well, in my first week I started designing the mobile interaction for the game. There are few rough sketches flying around like this one:




Michi (molp)

This week I worked on the upkeep mechanism for the planetary population infrastructure.

Each infrastructure project comes with its own set of upkeep materials. While, for example, the CoGC upkeep is due within a fixed time frame, the infrastructure project upkeeps have either a runtime of one or seven days. The amount of materials necessary depend on the level of the project. A project with a higher level can support the needs of a larger population, but the upkeep costs rise as well.

Another major difference to existing upkeep systems is that infrastructure projects can store upkeep materials for up to 28 days. We hope that this will make it easier for inhabitants and governors to run the infrastructure.


Fabian (Counterpoint)

These days I find myself surrounded by a whole bunch of ship-building-related spreadsheets that are all interconnected in various ways. Firstly there are the flight models. While we’ll keep STL flight mostly unchanged, we want to simplify the FTL flight model somewhat so that it’ll be easier to understand what’s going on (which might not be super important for the first iteration of ship building, but as soon as you get to designing your own ships, you’ll have to have a good grasp of how things work).

Then there’s ship damage. So far ships were simply invulnerable entities and didn’t have any upkeep costs whatsoever (except for the fact that you need to fill them with fuel). With the ship-building update, each ship’s condition will deteriorate based on various factors, such as the environment on the planets you’re landing on, a star’s solar activity or a system’s meteoroid density. Now, none of these factors will just instantly destroy your ship, but over time they’ll slowly whittle away at it, so at some point you’ll have to consider repairs to get your ship back up to full speed.

And last but not least, there’s the ship parts themselves (hull parts, engines, reactors, fuel tanks, cargo bays and more), their flight-related specs, the materials they’re made from, and of course combinations of all of the above in the form of the ship blueprints which you’ll be able to choose from initially. Of course those feed back heavily into all the other things I mentioned above, because all the systems and numbers need to make sense when merged with the actual outcome of the ship. Hence I expect all this to take some more back-and-forth iterating, but we’re getting there!


Nick

I wanted to start by saying thank you to everyone that participated in the Asteroid Day giveaway a few weeks ago! It was great to see many of you commenting and retweeting our post and even the official Asteroid Day account gave us a like or two, which was awesome. I’m really excited to get these T-shirts out to the winners but be patient with us since they have not been completely finished. For those of you who haven’t seen the artwork for Montem, please have a look (and maybe a like) here. I will probably do another poll soon asking you guys which planet you would like to see next, keep your eyes peeled!

Now that we have Manoj on board, we can finally look at overhauling the website with a fresh design while adding some much-needed new content. With that comes a lot of SEO preparation and I have been tracking key words and coming up with new sections to help us rank better for certain Google inquires. I have also started to setup a Facebook Ads campaign so hopefully we can start targeting some new players that may be interested in joining our wonderful Prosperous Universe community.


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

Happy trading!


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Videos:

[NickNack]

Resistance is Futile #247

Michi shares what it is like for governors to control the upkeep of planetary projects, Fabian circles back to onboarding new players as marketing gears up on Facebook and YouTube. Plus Martin is back in action!


Martin

Hello everyone. In case you don’t remember me: I am the managing director and founder of simulogics! Joking aside, I am back from my very pleasant vacation and I dove right back into work with batteries recharged. Besides the mountain of admin work that piled up during my absence, my primary occupation this week was taking care of (development) planning and helping out Michi in preparing some tests that should help us in finally squishing some annoying performance issues in production.


Michi (molp)

Last week I wrote about the upkeep of planetary projects and how the effective level of each building can be set by the governor via local rules. This week I was able to finish the command and here is what it looks like:



There are three columns that are relevant to the upkeep of a building: * built is the actual level of the building. If nothing is changed it determines the height of the building’s upkeep. The upkeep scales linearly with the building level. * target is the level the governor sets to be active for the next week. It can be set to any value between zero and the current built level. That way the upkeep can be fixed to a specific level. Setting target to max just means that next week’s level will always be as high as possible. * current is the level that is active at the moment. It only changes when a new week starts and will be set to the target level.

The last column ‘Contribution’ indicates how much a building has contributed towards a certain population need in the last period. In this simple example the security station covered 99% of the need for safety. In a more complex scenario this information will help governors to decide which are the proper target levels for the planet’s population.

Besides working on the local rules, I fixed some minor bugs and prepared the Populous release in general. I’ll be working on the release for one more week before taking a two-week vacation after which you can expect the release to happen if nothing comes up.


Fabian (Counterpoint)

In connection to thinking about what a new universe map could look like for an eventual reset, I started diving into an adjacent can of worms called “onboarding”. It’s something we’ve been pushing back on the list for a while, which makes sense given that we’re still regularly making pretty fundamental changes to the game (cough Populous cough). However with some marketing opportunities on the horizon and a mobile version in the works, it makes a lot of sense to think about where we want to go in terms of introducing new players to the game.

We released the “help system” recently which does a good job of pointing players towards the information they need initially, but is overall still very hands-off and as such only accessible to a pretty specific group of self-motivated players. While those players are at the core of our target audience, we believe there are many more beyond that who would also be interested in playing the game, but who we’re currently not catering to very well. Therefore I’m exploring a few different options now for a more “dedicated” onboarding experience.


Nick

After signing a contract with our first YouTube influencer, I have been emailing and setting up calls with others with both large and small followings. The idea is to have one or two big names talk about the game and then see what the impact of those videos bring. Later we will see if it makes sense to find others with large followings or stick to YouTubers with a smaller more focused audience that will perhaps require a lower fee. I had a call this past week with another big YouTuber so we will see how that goes, fingers crossed!

Other than contacting influencers, I refined the Facebook ads and they are ready to go. Once I get the go ahead we will run our first 4 ads for about five days and see what the results are from that. Since we are gearing up for Populous next month, some of my time will be spent creating content for the website and social media for the release as well as getting back into journalist mode with a new press release to create intrigue. By the way, thanks for everyone’s participation with the Twitter poll and I’m happy to announce that Promitor will be receiving a Planet Spotlight image!

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

Happy trading!


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Videos:

[NickNack]

Finding the Right Balance - Development Log #255

Michi fixes the dreaded drag and drop bug, Fabian balances out materials and recipes, Nick explores more ad strategies, and Manoj gets closer to a finalized mobile UI interface.


Nick

Last week was a short one for me since I took Thursday and Friday off to move apartments. Now that I am all moved in I can concentrate on all the different marketing projects in a much more conducive setting. Michi had a pretty fantastic idea about a new 15 second cut of the “Free to Play” trailer that will be used for YouTube Ads. It’s a pretty cool idea and I’m hoping to get it done soon with the help of the freelancer we used last time. If all goes well we could probably start YouTube ads in November. Facebook ads continue to be a bit frustrating since we keep getting flagged for “dating” ad content. I have repeatedly sent the ads for a re-review, and they eventually end up getting approved but it does interfere with the tests we are trying to run. So far for this experiment, “space explorers” using the cinematic Early Access trailer is performing better than “economists” using the Free to Play trailer. I will continue to optimize both ad groups moving forward.

Discord had an update where we can now broadcast certain posts to players that are not currently members of the PrUn server. I made some changes to our server so that we can now take advantage of this new update and also listed our server on some of the Discord lists out there. One of my goals for October is to look into different marketing strategies for Discord since we have a great community there already.


Michi (molp)

I am still working on internal tools, just like last week, so there is not much to tell about that… yet.

Besides that I’ve been looking into a few bug reports and fixed some minor issues. The most serious one was probably a drag and drop bug that prevented players that just joined from moving inventory from their ships to the newly founded bases. Luckily that bug could be worked around by refreshing the site, but still, it was annoying and whenever a newbie asked what’s going on in the general channel the players helped out! Thanks!

Using the necessary restart I also switched back the calculation of the populations’ average happiness to its indented weight values. During the explorer’s grace phase we set the average’s weights so that the current report accounted for ~90% of the happiness to boost population growth. Now that this phase is over the average happiness is being calculated from the last five reports with the more recent ones having a higher weight.

Currently, we see a couple of different strategies on how governors and company owners handle the challenges of the planetary populations. We have been asked to raise the production fee limitations for faction planets and systems in order to support tax-heavy strategies properly. We thought it was a good idea and production taxes can now be set between 10-90 (before: 10-30) for faction worlds and 5-120 (before: 5-40) for faction systems.


Fabian (Counterpoint)

Last week I put together a list of material tree changes and collected some feedback from the team. Besides a number of general balancing and consistency tweaks, the focus will be giving underused materials (e.g. NA, AMM, CA, TA) more applications, balancing out the production buildings more (by splitting “overloaded” buildings into multiple ones or shifting recipes to underused buildings).

I’m also planning to streamline software commodities by introducing multiple categories of complexity that build on one another (sort of like electronics already do it) and by spreading it a bit more over the workforce tiers (probably starting with Technicians).


Manoj

I’m working on bringing design consistency to the entire ecosystem of Prosperous Universe. After the critical feedback on the mobile interface, I struggled a bit to bring some of the sci-fi design elements into the limited real estate of the 6 inch mobile UI, while also trying to balance the visual simplicity and futuristic feel for the game. I hope to bring this to fruition next week.


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

Happy trading!


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[NickNack]

Marketing Madness - Development log #256

With Martin and Fabian out on vacation and Michi and Manoj hard at work on previously mentioned projects, Nick is left as the sole contributor for this week’s devlog.


Nick

So I will do my best to make the post interesting for our readers since I’m the only entry this week. Starting with Facebook ads, there has been a clear improvement with the “Cinematic Space” ad that targets sci-fi enthusiasts with our “First Access” trailer. I made some minor adjustments to this ad last week and so far this has been our best performing ad yet thanks to Facebook allowing me to see which headlines and text performed best from last week. I kicked out the less interesting content and added new content that was more in-line with what people were engaging with. Conversely, the “Economists” ad that used our “Honest Trailer” did not perform well and I will be changing it back to the “Free to Play” trailer since economists clearly have no sense of humor (kidding).

I also worked on the new website content that will include new pages for the game’s core elements: colonization, production, trade, shipping, and politics. We decided to split the current “Story” page into these 5 sections and blend it with elements from my “How to Colonize Space” article. This way we get a lot of good SEO content and more webpages for users to browse through while highlighting the most important aspects of the game.

If everything goes to plan, we should be starting YouTube ads next month! I’m really excited about using YouTube since it’s a proven platform for game ads and Google still has the most advanced digital marketing ad platform out there. Another one of my goals for this month is to come up with a plan to grow our Discord community. If you have any ideas or would like to see something specific in our server that maybe you’ve seen in other servers, please let me know. Last but not least, we are planning another livestream, so keep your eyes peeled for more info soon!

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

Happy trading!


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Videos:

[NickNack]

Coming to You LIVE - Development log #258

LIVE STREAM on Thursday at 16:00 UTC, details below! Meanwhile, the team plugs away on UI updates and ship building blueprints that bring us ever closer to Ignition.


Martin

As you probably know, one of our biggest mid-term projects is the mobile UI for Prosperous Universe. But alongside the mobile design, we are also working towards a cleaner design for the desktop version as well as a more harmonized look across all the pages around the game, like the website and the account management systems. Since this will require us to touch code in a lot of places, we realized that some parts of our (legacy) infrastructure aren’t really up to the task anymore, while some architecture decisions that we made four or so years ago for our PrUn-specific systems didn’t age too well.

So even though I was hoping to focus more on the game and less on backend stuff, I am back at work on our account management systems. This will be a pretty major rewrite of systems that - in part - have been operational for 10+ years. Once done, we hope to have less code duplication between the auxiliary systems required for all our games. Other nice side-effects will be easier extensions and integrations in the future and an overhauled look, of course. But more on the details in future devlogs!


Michi (molp)

Last week I finally started to work on the actual Ignition release. It started as usual: I went through the design documents and created a long list of tasks to implement. Each task belongs to a sub-goal (we call them ‘epic’) of the release and goes with a short description. Finally the list of tasks is converted into actual tickets in the issue tracker. This formalism might seem overly complex, or even redundant given that we already have the game design documents from Fabian, but it helps me when visualizing every aspect of a release and gives me a better understanding of the tasks ahead.

Of, course there is not much to see yet, but I still wanted to share a work-in-progress screenshot:


I added the new blueprint command BLU. Without parameters it is a list of all created blueprints a company has. Right now it only shows very basic information and has a button that allows a detailed view of a single blueprint to be opened.

In this first iteration of ship building blueprints consists of a series of component selections. For example, you can choose between four different kinds of STL engines. Each option will have one or more modifiers (e.g. STL speed +x%) that will change the performance parameters of the ship. Other components will include reactor type, storage sizes, hull types and more.


Nick

First things first: we are doing a Live Stream this Thursday at 16:00 UTC (17:00 CET, 12pm EDT, 9am PDT, 03:00 AEDT). Keep your eyes posted on our social media channels for the link and follow us on YouTube! We will discuss topics related to post-Populous release as well as some of topics from the community. Of course you can also write in any questions or comments that you might have while we are streaming.

Another special announcement: Iridium will be joining us as a guest during the Live Stream to voice his opinions and give valuable feedback as a governor in Prosperous Universe! I hope you all will join us in support of the game and its members. I had a really great chat with some of the governors last week, and I think we are going to have a great selection of topics for the stream. I’m really excited for Thursday so don’t forget to join in!

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

Happy trading!


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