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!

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:

I just started working on this but from the general layout it is obvious this will work similar like other contribution commands. The projects will have an upkeep that depends on the project type and level. There will be fast and slow upkeeps meaning some materials are consumed daily, others weekly. More on this in a later devlog though :) In the ‘upgrade’ section players can donate building materials to increase the project’s level. The last section titled ‘recent contributions’ will have a list of the contributions to either the upkeep or upgrade of the last 30 days or so.

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!

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.

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

Happy trading!

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