Late Summer, 2022

I’ll keep the preamble short: work is progressing on P&T2, but not – as those of you who follow development – as fast anyone would like. The main reasons are the usual, so I won’t go into those again and just write a bit about what is happening.

One part of the ongoing work is to expand and improve upon the “social” game. There is now actually a fair bit of work that has gone into this, and quite a bit happening behind the scenes. For instance, characters go out shopping (in the market district, church, and visit each other. What remains is to hook this up to the UI so that the player can encounter people (and visit new locations like the church) as well as writing the interactions the player can have.

Another part of the game that has seen some work during the past few months is the land combat. The basics of the system are in place now, but there are still some things I’m not 100% satisfied with, regarding the switch from ships to land and back again. There is also the issue of developing the new UI for the land combat sequences.

The UI is one of the aspects that is slowing down development now. I’ve spent a little time this summer experimenting with LibGdx (a cross-platform library for developing apps with Kotlin/Java). And I’ve pretty much concluded at this point that any future games I make will move to that framework; both because it has some pretty nice features, but especially because it opens up the possibility to create both Android, IOS, and desktop versions of games. As people who frequent the Discord will be aware, IOS is one of the more frequent requests for Pirates and Traders 2.

That experimentation does leave me with somewhat of an itch; namely, that I need to build the UI for land combat, but I’d much rather build it in LibGdx than in the standard Android framework that the rest of P&T2 is built in (given that I hope to reuse the base code latter). At the same time, I also see the opportunity for a rewrite of the UI, which is in a little need of an overhaul. But that of course takes time – of which I am perennially short.

At the moment, I’m still undecided, but I suspect I may end up falling down on the side of “just do it”, since that is what I often end up doing even when that may not be smart. It’s the curse of working in games for a hobby. If so, though, I’ll still be making regular releases of the game going forward – just focused mostly on the social and story aspects where there is not so much UI work involved.

As always, if you’d like to get in touch, please visit the Discord. Until next time!