Prosperous Universe
PRO License - Thanksgiving Discount!
Use code TRKY10
Happy Thanksgiving and see you in APEX!
Prestige and Power - Development Log #362
Good news everyone! We are close to our next release, and it'll be called Prestige. You can find all the details in the Release Notes, but if you followed the devlogs over the course of the last weeks, you'll already know that the new main feature is going to be faction contracts. We haven't settled on a release day, but it'll be early December.
Speaking of faction contracts, I wrapped up the development last week and deployed it to the test server. If you are a supporter with test server access you can check it out over there. So far so good, we haven't experienced any major problems, so I moved on to a whole stack of smaller tasks that piled up since the last release.
For example: Up until now we weren't able to change a company's name or code when it contained a typo or a player bought a supporter pack that allowed for a one or two digit company code. The only option to change that has been a COLIQ. Last week, I finally added that functionality to our support tools.
I also increased the retention time for BASIC accounts. Back when we added the automatic deletion of inactive companies BASIC wasn't a thing yet. In the past we have had some complaints from BASIC players that were inactive for a while, who said that their companies were deleted rather quickly. The new inactivity duration is now 120 days before the deletion process will start.
There are still tasks like these left, so I will continue to work on them this week, while at the same time preparing everything for the release!
Fabian (Counterpoint)
Just today I added a couple more quality-of-life improvements to Prestige: Your ships will now display their maximum weight and volume capcities in the FLT command. Additionally, if a ship is not capable of FTL flight, its FTL fuel tank will be marked in red. This will make it easier to spot significant differences between your ships at a glance and should be especially helpful now that some players already have sets of 5 or more pretty diverse ships.
I mentioned the other tweaks and balancing changes in previous devlogs, but you'll also find all of them in the release notes linked above!
Nick
Make sure to check your email this week, there's a special Thanksgiving (even if you are not American, haha) treat for you!
I also worked on a lot of influencer marketing last week and we finally have a new video up online. I think the video turned out pretty well and we have been getting some new players from the ad since it posted. There will be another video in December and January that we have lined up from different influencers.
Now is the time to cast your final vote for planet QQ-001a to receive a formal name. You can vote here!
As always: we'd love to hear what you think: join us on Discord or the forums!
Read the original article on the Prosperous Universe Website.
Happy trading!
Contract Details - Development Log #357
This week I was able to finish the exploration faction contract I talked about last week. While the contracts themselves did already work last week, lots of details have been added. Have a look at the video below. The player receives three contract offers from the faction:
[Please visit the Prosperous Universe website]
As you can see, all three are variations of the same type of exploration contract. In the preamble, we now briefly explain what faction contracts are about. We also list all faction offers that are received at the same time, and clicking on one them will open the respective contract view. The preamble also contains the mission description.
The payment for a faction contract can either consist of some currency only or a mixture of currency and materials. The materials rewarded are usually construction fabs, fuels or basic consumables.
In case of the exploration contract, we chose a random location a few jumps away from the players headquarters. It is up to the player to decide if the trip is worth their time and money. These types of contracts do have rather long deadlines, so they can be combined with other trips, for example deliveries or supply runs to the stations.
Now that we have established how the faction contract system works in general, I will continue implementing other types of faction contracts.
Nick
Last week was spent doing a variety of tasks like finding new influencers for a sponsored video, getting newsletters ready, and coordinating with SeaPear on the tutorial remakes. I'm really excited about getting these new tutorials out there since I think they have turned out very well and the community could definitely use the update. It has been awhile since the original videos were posted and there are many differences in game between now and then. You won't have to wait to much longer since we decided to release the "early game" videos sooner and then the "late game" videos will join the rest when they are finished. Make sure you are also tuning into Pear Talks PrUn Podcast!
As always: we'd love to hear what you think: join us on Discord or the forums!
Happy trading!
Full article on https://prosperousuniverse.com/blog/2022/10/17/contract-details-357/
Memory Monopoly - Development Log #349
I continued to work on improving the server performance this week. I already wrote a bit about it in last week's devlog. Besides the accounting system, we found other places where we can improve the memory consumption. To our astonishment, the behavior responsible for notifications came up in the memory analysis as well. Usually in-game notifications are removed after they have been marked read and seen for a while. It seems though, there are players who never mark the notifications as seen, and thus they stay around forever. In some cases we have found companies with 25k+ unseen notifications. The fix was simple: Even if notifications are not marked as seen and read, they will be removed after 45 days.
We also identified a potential problem in the behavior responsible for the commodity exchange trading. This behavior is used by both player run companies and by the automatic market makers. It seems that parts of the trading information, like order matches, are not deleted properly and stack up as well. We haven't gotten around to fixing this yet, but it is on the list.
All in all, we are pretty happy with the recent performance improvements. The general stability is very high, and we haven't seen an unscheduled restart in the last five days. Let's hope it stays like this for a while ;)
Besides the performance issues, I started working on faction contracts. Faction contracts are an addition to the recently added custom contracts, where faction agents send contract offers to players on a regular basis. These contracts are primarily intended for new players to increase their income, better utilize their starter ships, and get to know the game's mechanics. Faction contracts can be accepted by any license type. Older player will also receive faction contract offers from time to time. I just started with the implementation of the feature, and I intend to go into detail in the devlogs as the implementation progresses.
Nick
Last week I continued to do more toying around with the pricing pages and decided to work on the PRO license comparision table. Right now, the chart really makes the PRO license look amazing and free verision look very vanilla and bare bones. Previously we were trying to really push the PRO license on new players, but we know that players will always check out the game for free first and then decide if it's worth it to upgrade or not to PRO. I decided to completely redo this table with three categories: Free, Basic, and PRO and also stress that PRO is geared towards players that have already put a significant investment into the game and want more to do. The Free license column will be completley reworked to show off the best aspects of the game that is available for everyone. The table will become less of a comparision table and more of a tool to understand how each license works and who it is for. I think this will help drive home that idea that Prosperous Universe can be played at different speeds and is not pay-to-win.
As always: we'd love to hear what you think: join us on Discord or the forums!
Happy trading!
CONVERGENCE Release is Now Live!
SHIP ENHANCEMENTS
Not enough room for all your cargo? Ship moving a little too slow? Now is your chance to upgrade your ship incrementally without having to fulfill the entire blueprint. Once the ship is parked and unloaded in a shipyard, it’s time for the magic to begin.
PRIVATE PACTS
Some business deals are better kept in secret. With Custom Contracts you can give your pal some cash, request specific materials from a certain someone, or only deal directly with those of your choosing. Just make sure they pay you back… with interest
CUTTING OFF THE CONTRACT
Perhaps the deal didn’t go as planned, or someone couldn’t exactly uphold their end of the bargain. Now you can send a contract termination request to end all aspects of the arrangement. Given that the other party agrees, the contract will become null and void.
Release Imminent - Development Log #344
There is a good chance you experienced the extended downtime we had earlier in the week. It kept me busy for quite a while, fixing all the issues and bugs that came with it. If you want to know more about it, I wrote a short post-mortem blog post detailing what happened here.
In more positive news, we are currently planning what will go into our next release. The original plan was to release another, smaller maintenance release fixing a few long-standing bugs and introducing small features and quality of life updates with it. We decided to do a feature release before that though, because I will be on paternal leave later this summer. The release will entail the ship upgrade feature Fabian mentioned in his last devlogs and the first iteration of the custom contracts features.
We will deploy the ship upgrades feature on the test server later this week and let you know on Discord once it is live. In order for players with test server access to actually be able to test it, we will remove the update costs that occur going from one blueprint to another.
Fabian (Counterpoint)
After finishing up the ship upgrades, I looked into a couple smaller tweaks for the upcoming release. I'll just let the video below do the talking for one of the more relevant ones.
(To see video visit https://prosperousuniverse.com/blog/2022/07/18/release-imminent-344/)
Nick
Last week was fairly normal for me as I continue to seek out different channels that would like to collaborate with us and also for new influencers/streamers. One of the more interesting topics I worked on was the tutorial remakes project. I was able to reach out to someone that is already making content for us and asked if they would like to work with us in an official capacity. We had a conversation that went really well, and I am pretty confident that the remakes will turn out well and help new players engage with the game after so many changes have taken place since the original tutorials were made.
As always: we'd love to hear what you think: join us on Discord or the forums!
Happy trading!
New Company Creation Screens
This is not only a re-write, but also a re-design with a focus on new players' perspective. Similar to an RPG where you select your class first, players see the Company Profile (Victualler, Fuel Engineer, ..) first. A new player, who doesn't know anything about the game, can choose what sounds the best and what they like the most.
Next comes the Faction Selection. Next to the faction selection controls, we'll show the universe map with the factions highlighted, so the players get a sense of where everything is.
The starting location screen then allows the user to select from a list of starting locations filtered by the faction. It shows basic information about the selected planet, like population, resources, just like before. The starting location will be highlighted on the map.
In the last step, the players can then choose a company name and code. We have changed how the forms behave, and once there is some valid input (minimum length requirement fulfilled) it checks on each keystroke if a given name or code is actually available. This will solve the problem of players getting stuck when entering names that already exist.
Expedited Custom Contracts - Development Log #333
Fabian (Counterpoint)
One of the results of our recent team meeting was that we bumped the topic of custom private contracts up on our priority list, which means we need all the details figured out. It's an often requested feature that also works really well for the changes to politics and infrastructure we're planning (and also the faction-contract aka "quest" system which, as the name suggests, will likely be contract-based itself).
What I currently have in mind is that you create your own contracts from a set of "building blocks". So for example, you could add a payment condition, then a delivery, and then another payment. Or you could have a delivery, a provisioning and a pickup without any payment at all (essentially a "barter trade"). Each condition could depend on a previous one or not, and each one might have its own deadline. When you're happy with your "draft", you'll then be able to send it to a potential partner, which puts the contract into a new "offer" state that can be accepted, rejected or edited on the receivers side with their own suggestions and sent back.
In line with the game's sandbox-driven philosophy, this system opens up lots of gameplay possibilities but naturally also raises quite a few questions, starting with what accounting value to assign to items when they weren't really "paid for" in the traditional sense. Additionally, we want to allow you to create repeating contracts or, in case you agree with your partner, cancel already closed contracts, which need to be handled cleanly as well.
By the way, in case you have any thoughts on the topic yourself, we're currently collecting feedback in a forum thread!
Nick
In conjunction with the Steam release, I also planned for a big influencer video to come out the week after, which was last week. If you are interested, we just got a massive influx from Real Civil Engineer's video. This really helped with getting even more players where they now have the option of playing either on Steam or on their browser. Aside from that, I also worked on the Steam store page and monitoring reviews that keep trickling in. A huge shoutout to all those that are helping coach new players on either Discord or the in-game chat. You guys rock!
Michi (molp)
This week has been all about technical maintenance, again! Due to the Steam release and an integrated video ad of a youtuber, we saw a large amount of new registrations. A dying, single node has been no problem so far, as it is just rebooted and is reunited with the rest again after a few minutes. This time we saw cascading failures: The load left behind by a dying node would be moved over the remaining nodes, pushing them over the edge as well. Unfortunately PrUn wasn't able to recover from these failures in an automatic fashion. Even worse: the error messages we received were misleading and we spent quite a bit of time looking in the wrong direction.
After a while of tweaking the game is running stable again now, but there is still some research left to do, which I will do this week.
As always: we'd love to hear what you think: join us on Discord or the forums!
Happy trading!
Prosperous Universe is now LIVE on Steam!
WHAT IS PROSPEROUS UNIVERSE?
Prosperous Universe is a space economy MMO built around a strong online community where players venture out into the universe and carve their own path.
Make meaningful choices that directly impact the overall economy and contribute to the success or demise of your company. Be the first to discover a new optimization strategy or form a coalition with other players. And with no PvP, the possibilities are endless.
Climb the political ladder as you trade, negotiate, manipulate, or bribe your way to the top. Each planet is home to several factions, and it’s up to you to decide who to trust and who to betray.
Prosperous Universe Launches April 20th on Steam!
WHAT IS PROSPEROUS UNIVERSE?
Prosperous Universe is a space economy MMO built around a strong online community where players venture out into the universe and carve their own path.
Make meaningful choices that directly impact the overall economy and contribute to the success or demise of your company. Be the first to discover a new optimization strategy or form a coalition with other players. And with no PvP, the possibilities are endless.
Climb the political ladder as you trade, negotiate, manipulate, or bribe your way to the top. Each planet is home to several factions, and it’s up to you to decide who to trust and who to betray.