Crew Expansion – 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!

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).

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!

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

Happy trading!