Heads up – development log #177

At the beginning of this week, Julian finally released the Honest Trailer to the world. In the meantime, Martin has finished an important back-end adjustment, and Michi is almost ready to launch the demolition refunds program.

Michi (molp)

This week I was mostly busy with preparing the update we released on Friday. As announced last week its main change was the improved building demolition feature. You can find out what’s that all about and see all the other changes in the corresponding release notes.

Speaking of release notes: I added a new section called ‘upcoming update’ to let the players know in advance what the next update is most likely to be about. Since we are still in alpha, we want to move quickly and things might break. Introducing a new feature or a change in a gentle and smooth way without upsetting anyone is really hard and time consuming and usually requires code that is only used once for the transition. So we might not do this every time. I think it’s just fair to let everyone know what might change beforehand so they can prepare and plan ahead.

When I was not working on the release, I managed to get some work done on the upcoming local markets. I’ll probably have more to report about them next week.

Julian (Mjeno)

The biggest event of my work week was our little April Fools’ joke on Monday. We finally released our Honest Trailer to the world, which means I can now talk about it! It was hard not to spill the beans while we were making it because it was so much fun.

I first had the idea for the video months ago and almost didn’t pitch it to Michi and Martin because I wasn’t sure it was any good. Mostly, I wasn’t sure I could write the script for a funny video, which is something I’d never done before. But when I told the others, they were intrigued by the idea, so I went for it and put together a provisional version with my own VO. The whole team liked it, so we decided to spend some money on a pro (his name is deepmalevoice on Fiverr, excellent guy), and we don’t regret a single penny.

Six days after its release, the Honest Trailer is sitting at 806 views and 55 likes on YouTube. The feedback from within our community has been very positive, and some new people joined us after seeing the video on Reddit. When we saw that even Reddit didn’t mind our self-promotional posts, we realized we must’ve done something right.

In case you missed it, here’s the video:

Martin

I’m happy to say that I was able to wrap up the majority of my work on the new data loading system I talked about in devlogs 174 and 176. I showed it to Michi for the first time this week and he started using parts of it for the upcoming local markets feature already. Meanwhile, I ported some code over to the new system that was indirectly affected by my changes on the client-side. There are still a few bells and whistles missing, but I’ll get to them once they are actually required.

In other news, I sat down with Alex and Michi this week do finalize the first draft of the Player Rating concept. This is going to be the next major topic I’ll be working on as it’s going to be relevant for the local markets. But more on that soon!

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

Happy trading!