Time passes quickly when one is busy, and November has been a very busy month (in real life; not my game development career). A few updates on what is moving at the moment.
Pirates and Traders is almost ready for a new update (now testing). This update will bring a couple of new encounters that allow you to interact with the Cimarron port, though just short ones (nothing major). Perhaps more interesting is the new tavern encounter that will also be added in this update, which gives you the opportunity of recruiting a random specialist crew member. This has been a much requested feature for a while now. After this update, I hope to manage one more update before year’s end, though we’ll see how that goes.
I’m still working on the ship combat engine in Pirates and Traders 2. Adding multiple ships into encounters does pose a challenge, in terms of making sure that the player is receiving sufficient information to take the right decisions. There is also the question about how detailed one can make the combat system. There are many small touches I could add to make the game system more “realistic”, but such considerations have to be always tempered with concern for how things are to be handled in the interface. Either way, I am hoping to post some screenshots of this soon.
The majority of my time is still being spent on Dwarf King, though. I’ve currently implemented the core of the game engine and done a first draft of the game interface. Work now is concerned with nailing down the game implementation; ensure that the orders work as intended, streamlining stuff that is currently a little fuzzy, and trying to make sure that the game interface provides the player with the feedback they require. One point of concern is the resource system; the game currently has a complex resource system with 12 trade goods. One of the hard decisions that will need to be considered during this next pass through the game is whether that is just too many. The game currently has a really nicely developed resource production system (e.g., the player harvests fur, which gets produced into clothing, which is required to clothe your people, etc), but as always when working with mobile devices, there is a trade-off in terms of complexity vs presenting information to the player. It’s a tricky balance.