In da hub - development log #146

This week, we announced a new freelance team member: Alexander Zacherl is assisting us as a game designer! Michi took some well-deserved time off, Martin has been preparing the “hub” and Julian has been handling press contacts and legalese.

Martin

Just as planned, my work this week revolved around the Prosperous Universe account management system (aka “hub”).

My first course of action was to get the current implementation back to work using a more robust technical foundation. When I wrote the initial version of the hub, I opted for quick turn-around times and fewer technical components because the whole thing was more or less a single-purpose app that merely served as a thin layer above our existing account management backend. Now I’m paying the price by having to do things twice. But there’s a saying among programmers: Any software needs to be written at least three times before it’s any good!

Anyway, I achieved my goal. All existing functionality is back in. It just doesn’t look all that great yet because I haven’t quite finished the visual design. It’s going to use the latest style improvements from our new homepage as well as the first parts of the UI rework in progress for the game itself (more on that in the future).

Julian (Mjeno)

First things first: This week, we revealed a new team member. Alexander Zacherl is a freelance consultant on design, marketing, and management. For us, he has been and will be busy with game design problems, ranging from the material tree (remember the tool we built for him?) to dominance systems that will become an important part of how Corporations interact.

Now a fun fact about me: My primary field of study at university was literature. My minor subject was linguistics and translation to and from French and English. I chose not to work in any of those fields, but some of the skills I acquired do come in handy sometimes. Like this week, when I set out to translate our privacy statement as well as our terms of service. You think you know a language until you are confronted with legal texts, user manuals, or scientific papers. Luckily, these are the kinds of texts we were actually being prepared for at university (because that’s the job reality for many translators), so I think I’ve been holding my own.

Another thing I’ve been doing all week was to keep in touch with the first journalists I reached out to or met during devcom or gamescom. Among other things, we’ll be contributing a few articles to different game development sites that will allow you to peek behind the scenes of some of our processes.

Lastly, list entries are still keeping me busy with everyone having their own requirements for word count, highlighted features, wanting unique texts or us linking back to their site. The uptick in newsletter sign-ups is continuing, although, looking at our analytics, I have to say honestly that it can’t be attributed to our new list entries. When all entries are online and some time has passed, I think I’ll do a write-up of their impact on our traffic.

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

Happy trading!