Selling Ads – development log #181

This week, we’re giving some insights into the differences between commodity exchange contracts and local market contracts, and the new cases the latter bring about.

Julian (Mjeno)

This week, I tackled the first backer rewards for all the good people who purchased one of our support tiers, such as the exclusive comm channels, the mentions in credits, supporter badges, and physical rewards. Right now, I’m granting tier-based rights manually, but I would like to (help) implement an automated system across Prosperous Universe, its forum, Discord server, and even AirlineSim, which identifies tiers and assigns user roles automatically in the future. By the way: We’re looking for someone to design the supporter badges (various minimalist vector graphics). If you feel up to the task or know somebody who might be, let us know!

Next, I created a player survey which will be rolled out soon. Apart from the feedback on the forum and Discord server our community is thankfully providing, there are some specific questions we’d like to know the answers to, so stay tuned for that!

We’re also still working on the answers to last week’s questions. We’ll be talking to some other, more experienced game studios soon to find out how they deal with cheating. In the meantime, I’ve already taken care of the first few cases that came to our attention.

Lastly, I’d like to mention that I’m pretty satisfied with the current activity we’re seeing in Prosperous Universe. Although our Honest Trailer (which racked up over 1000 views!) was our last notable marketing measure, meaning we haven’t advertised the game much in about a month, our player numbers have been pretty stable for a while and are even slowly increasing. That means two things: I have managed to generate enough buzz for new players to be dripping in continuously, and Martin and Michi have created a good enough game for many people to stay. And personally, I have to say that this run and its pace feel right to me. I hope you guys feel the same way!

Michi (molp)

I made some progress with the contract system this week. In devlog #179 I told you that the local market selling ad is not as simple as the buying one when it comes to the contract part. This is because we haven’t implemented the corresponding contract conditions yet.

In the contract for a selling ad, three things have to happen. The seller needs to provision the goods he wants to sell. The buyer needs to pay for the goods and lastly pick them up at the seller’s local market location. I implemented the provisioning mechanism and it works like this: The ‘fulfill’ button of the contract condition is enabled when enough inventory space is available. Once clicked, the materials will vanish from the inventory but still use up volume and weight. They are blocked and cannot be used in any way. Once the contract is fulfilled, the materials are completely removed from the store. If the contract is breached, the materials are simply ‘unblocked’ and become available again.

Nex week I will probably focus on making conditions depend on one another. In the case described above, the seller needs to provision the materials before the buyer can even try to pick them up. Unlike in the commodity exchanges, there is no escrow, meaning a seller can offer materials she doesn’t have yet. In that case, trying to pick them up won’t make sense and we need to prevent that.

If you have been playing PrUn for a while, you might know that we struggle when it comes to the game design of fuel production. Somehow we didn’t get it right in the past tests and even in this one it took a long time until the first FTL fuel was produced. Here are a few relevant statistics:

This is the amount of produced STL and FTL fuel in the last 24 hours over the course of the last 20 days. STL production is roughly at 1-2k units a day and a small but steady supply of FTL fuel is being generated.

The next chart shows the production rate of resources necessary to refine FTL fuel. Hydrogen has been available from the start, but Helium 3 and Tectosilite (a Helium 3 source) is only available on non starter planets. It seems as if someone managed to start extracting Tectosilite on April 14th.

For comparison, this chart shows the necessary resources for the production of STL fuel.

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

Happy trading!