At the end of August, we added the ability to move credits to our buildings, and talked about getting it to the point where we could actually do business.
Business is now open.
Trading
With this done, new players are no longer required to spend the time gathering ore and energy and making metal to build a building. Metal was the big limitation: making your own metal is slow. More importantly, we can start making higher level resources. Before now, each person needed to make each resource required, rather than buying it from someone else.
We’re still working on expanding trade policy. We have maximums (how much people can sell you), but not minimums (how much they can’t buy). We also need to make it so that one building can buy and sell the same resource. Right now you can buy or sell, but not both. There’s going to be other changes to buildings as we get more testing done too.
Testing
Speaking of testing, we’re bringing a few more people on the testing team. I’m waiting for us to have NPCs to fight against before we bring in a lot of people to test, but we don’t have enough testers right now to test trading and the economy. If everything goes well, we’ll see more activity in our test sector; and start moving towards something we can pretend is a functioning economy.
The other thing we’re going to be testing for is the interface. I can’t do that – I know how everything works, so if something doesn’t explain what it does, I am probably not reading that. However, there is a lot we are doing that isn’t clear – different from Pardus, as well as from other games – that we need to make sure we’re explaining everything.
For example: what does all this mean:
(It means that my building is a platform, but hasn’t been upgraded to a station. I have one solar panel and two basic foundries.)
Next Steps
Once we are done finishing up the basics of trading, we’ll be back to improving combat. However, we need to make sure trading works; and we will need enough of an economy that someone can start making the top-end resources. Stimulants will give ChronoCycles, allowing you to do more. Robots will also allow you to repair yourself in combat.
For combat, we need to make it so players will defend themselves when offline; and then bring back NPCs (we’ve had them before – but they didn’t do anything except exist), make you be able to fight them, and make them fight back. Along the way, we’ll bring in a few more testers to make sure that’s working and start balance-testing combat. At that point, we will probably need to evaluate what comes next.
