Post-Prelude – development log #202

Friday’s Prelude update has introduced a couple of new features, most of them on purpose. The big news of this week: We’re bringing on a new game designer!

Martin

The good: The contract with our new Game Systems Designer has been signed and he will join the project in January 2020. That feels like an awfully long time, but it can’t be helped. Be that as it may, we are incredibly happy to have found him and we can’t wait to share more details.

The bad: I spent the majority of my week working on authentication infrastructure for several of our backend tools, including the translation system we use for AirlineSim. Stuff like this is necessary and the translation tool in particular might come in handy for Prosperous Universe some day, but it still isn’t anything you as a player can get too excited about…I guess.

The ugly: I came down with a cold on Sunday and decided to do the only smart thing and sit it out on Monday and Tuesday. While this considerably reduced the amount of hours available this week, I am happy to report that I was feeling alright again on Wednesday. Yay!

Michi (molp)

Like almost every week that has a PrUn release, most of my time got sucked up in preparing and doing the release: finishing the implementation, testing the changes, updating documentation, writing release notes, creating the release page and finally doing the release, anxiously watching the log files, hotfixing immediate issues and of course talking to you, the players, about the changes. Of course I am not doing this all by myself, but I am still involved into most of it. That is the reason why I don’t have much else to talk about this week.

I started designing and implementing the first things for the upcoming Expanse release but there is nothing to show yet. The next week is short, as there is a public holiday in Germany, but I hope I can show, or at least tell, you what I am working on.

Over the past few days, there have been many interesting discussions on Discord about the current state of the game and the upcoming, now released, changes. I really enjoyed them and wanted to thank you for the feedback. It is much appreciated and without it we’d had a hard time designing the game.

Julian (Mjeno)

You might have heard that Prosperous Universe has been picked up by the first streamers on Twitch recently. Seeing the impact it has had on our community, I got back into reaching out to content creators on YouTube and Twitch this week. After my last wave of e-mails went almost entirely ignored despite being pretty personalized and, in my opinion, just detailed enough, I’m hoping for a little more success this time around. Our new trailer dropped in the meantime, and maybe it’ll convince a few more people to check out the game and get back to me. I didn’t shy away from bigger names this time and reached out to some creators who have been suggested by our community many times in the past. Keeping my fingers crossed!

Then, on Friday, we dropped our Prelude update for which I helped create the update page Michi linked above. It has brought about a few new bugs and questions which, beside the wiki update, have taken up most of my work time over the weekend. Fixes are probably coming tomorrow, when normal people start working again! (:

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

Happy trading!