Spring break – development log #170

It’s Martin speaking. Spring hit Germany this week-end! Out of the blue (or rather, the grey), we have clear skies, sunny weather and crowds of people flooding parks and promenades. Those crowds include Mjeno, which is why I have the honor of writing the intro to this week’s devlog!

Martin

I spent an above-average amount of time talking to Michi this week. We were (and still are) brainstorming about how we want to proceed in terms of feature development after the upcoming reset. While a pretty solid roadmap exists, we felt like it didn’t do the actual circumstances after the First Access release justice anymore. The usual theory-gets-hit-by-reality problem. We haven’t arrived at any final decision yet, though. So I’m looking forward to more creative chats over the next few days :-D

In the technical department I looked into several bugs that were uncovered by an unscheduled cluster reset last week. While the First Access phase primarily serves to validate new features and balancing, the technical systems are just as much under test. So with the next patch those particular issues will hopefully be a thing of the past.

Michi (molp)

I continued on the the statistics / analytics feature I mentioned a while ago. For the coming tests we want to have more insights into what is going on in the game world on a large scale. Of course playing the game and listening to the complaints and remarks of the community helps a lot (we’ve had some great feedback so far) but eventually that alone is not enough.

At the beginning of the current test I implemented a system that would allow us to see the balance of the three market makers. It’s just a simple statistic but it helped to see where the money ends up. I generalized the approach and created a system that makes it easier to add statistics in the future. As a proof of concept I added a dimension to the market maker statistic so that we now can see the balance of each market maker per commodity.

Right now I am working on a statistic that shows company creations and deletions and what profile, starting planet and faction the players choose.

This is not the end of the line though: We want to have analytics that go well beyond that and can tell us how players are doing in the game and what might be the reasons players stop playing. But that lays still in the future.

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