Reading our devlogs on a weekly basis gives you a good idea about what we are currently up to. It is easy though to lose sight of the big picture and our medium term goals. With this devlog we want to recap what happened in the last months and what happens next.
In July last year we have been able to finally share the good news with you: Our application for funding from the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action has been greenlit (devlog #393). The application consisted of three major parts:
- A German translation of the game and related pages
- Part one of the politics extension: parliaments and motions
- Part two of the politics extension: infrastructure
Translation
The funding program will run for a whole year. Right after the summer break we started working on the German translation. The German translation has been a requirement of the funding program. Since there was no way around that, we decided to translate several other resources as well: the account management, the handbook, the website and last but not least the Steam page.
We released the german translation in January with the Transmission Release and took the opportunity to do some influencer marketing on german YouTube channels as well. I even joined a twitch dev stream of a large German streamer and presented the game to his audience.
Doing all of this, not just translating the game itself, definitely worked out for us. We saw increased sign-up rates over many weeks and could grow the player base.
Parliaments and Motions
We started working on the actual politics extension in autumn last year (devlog #405). But what is it all about?
We want to move away from single players being governors, to a system that has parliaments. These parliaments can have multiple members of parliament (count depending on planet population, elected by the local players) that form the local government. All activities of these governments have to go through a voting system based on motions. That way the activities of governments are far more transparent for the inhabitants of the planets than with the current system.
Right now, being the governor of a planet is a tough job, since APEX doesn't provide them with the proper tools, for example to manage funds. All fees that a governor earns are being transferred to and divided amongst the members of the governor's corporation. Since there is no separation between the accounting of a company and the governor, most players form a new corporation, specifically while they are in office.
To combat that, we decided, a long time ago actually, that governments need their own accounting and other systems. In order to make the accounting system independent of the governor's company accounting we can implement it in two ways:
a. Have separate commands for everything a player does when acting as governor.
b. Allow a player to switch between several contexts (company, government, ..) and re-use the existing commands.
Obviously we decided to pursue option b. Here is how we envision it:
Once a player gets voted into office a new context is available (think 'Government of Promitor', for example). The context can be changed via a drop-down menu, similar to the existing screens drop-down. Once switched to the new context, a default screen greets the new member of parliament. The company-related screens are all hidden, instead the player can create new screens that are relevant for the given context. Using an existing command, for example FINLA, will not show the player's liquid assets, but rather the ones of the government.
We are currently making good progress on these features. The context switch has been the toughest nut to crack, but it works now:
We have a system in place that prevents access to commands that should not be available in a given context:
There is a new `GOV` command that displays all kinds of government information:
Motions can be created, edited and the voting process is implemented:
We are currently working on the motion components. These are the building blocks of the motions and effectively describe the outcome of a motion. We have many ideas for motion components, but here is the list with a few essential ones:
- Local rules: So far, the local rules can only be changed by the governor. We want to move this system over into the new governments
- Population infrastructure: Motions will allow to change the target levels
- Government programs: These will also be a responsibility of the government
- Access to the FX: Since governments have their own accounting now, we want to allow motions to create buy and sell orders on the FX markets
- Payout: A payout motion will allow to transfer government funds to a player
- Fees: The government will also be able to control production, warehouse and local market fees via motions
Once we have all these essential features implemented we will release them. Right now we don't have a concrete release data in mind. We'll let you know once we do :)
Infrastructure
You might have noticed that we haven't talked about the last part of the funding application: Infrastructure.
The motivation here is two-fold: We want to make the job of the governments even more interesting by letting them control certain infrastructure via motions. At the same time we want to make the universe more vivid and interesting for players.
In the past months we have created design documents for different kinds of infrastructure:
- Space elevators that allow to transfer cargo to the surface/orbit without using a ship
- Beacons that allow faster STL or FTL travel
- "Hyperlanes" that open up new FTL connections
.. and a few more. We haven't decided yet what the infrastructure part will be. Again, we'll let you know once we do :)
We hope this devlog makes it clearer were we are at the moment and what to expect in the next months.