This particular post will not be as packed with new visual things to show off. Most of the things I worked on since my last post have been fixing some bugs, getting movement moving with less sudden lurches, playing around with different techniques of handling some of my networking, and planning for the future.

Instead I decided for this post I'd talk about the TRADE SCENE as this game is broken into two sequences. The space scene where you spend most of your time will be spent a game year at a time in. The initial design has this at about 6 minutes per year. Then the concept is that all the corporations meet in a trade segment where they can sell resources to the government, buy resources from the government, and trade with each other.

Image of the M.U.L.E. trading sequence on an Atari 800

In the initial designs Version 1 - 5 this was the most heavily inspired by M.U.L.E. segment of the game.

This is going to change...

New approach to the trade scene

We decided we're going to go full third person view approach for the trade scene. We'll make the visit to the space station a fully 3D experience.

Here is the plan so far.

The player's agent (it will not be them) will arrive at a hangar on the space station with the agents from the other players. These agents will have clothing colored in a way to indicate team color, and we are talking about having the player's avatar as like a badge, or other indicator attached to the clothing. This agent will come in either a male or female version, but as they are agents they will not be customizable by the player. Though who your agent is can and likely will play during game play. We will have 11 types of agents in both male and female. There will be a generic agent... which we have the initial concept done for those...

Which will only appear when you have not purchased any levels of tech. After that we will choose which agent should appear based upon which tech you are most advanced in. In the event of a tie between multiple tech branches the one you reached that level first at will be chosen.

So if Military is your dominant tech then you'll get an agent designed to represent military, if crime is your dominant tech you'll get an avatar for that.

How it ultimately will be different from the older method is that you actually are no longer locked into going forcefully through each trade sequence.

You will run down a hall which will have some posters and/or LCDs on the walls showing the state of the quadrant at the moment based upon how all the colonies combined are doing.

You will enter an octagonal room where the center will be a score board visible from all direction. Around the room will be various trade kiosks. If you wish to buy/sell food then you go use the food trade kiosk.

Up another hallway will be a stats room that I plan to have showing graphs related to how various things are progressing in the game over time. It will be a purely information related room.

Down another hallway is the gambling area.

When you are done trading you should go to the gambling area and you will sit down and begin gambling. We may replace this with some mini-game.

Once all the players have entered gambling mode the trade scene will know that it is ended and it will progress to the next space scene.

This means the trade scene could be very quick, or it might take a bit. It totally depends upon the players. If all of the players ran straight through the octagonal room and to the gambling room then the trade sequence would be over in less than a minute.

At the moment our art looks like those agents I provided above. Those are generic agents my son made yesterday as a test. We have a lot of DAZ assets and could do some amazing stuff with that, but I have not purchased my indie licenses for the DAZ 3D stuff yet so we do not want to use it for this game. We are using FUSE assets that we have a license for in this game.

It will be quite awhile before we actually get to the trade scene. I want the space scene stuff more or less done and fully completed before moving onto the trade scene. That gives us time to iterate on the map, and come up with some ideas.

Here is a quick image I made the other day on the planned layout of that scene...

I hope some of you enjoy the game development blogs. It also gives me some history to fall back on in the future. When we release the game in the future if it does well hopefully these blogs might be some good advertisement for steemit/busy/steem etc.

Steem On!