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.

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.

Michi (molp)

The 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:

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

Happy trading!

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