Monday, September 5, 2016

Sea Trading Game- Making missions more meaningful

After making my ship move around the screen, the first thing that I did was create primitive missions. These missions were randomly generated, and didn't really mean anything at all, aside from a way to earn some money. That, however, has changed this week.

For those of you who have been around a while, you may remember that only one mission was ever assigned at a time. That is now quite different. Look at this one random collection of missions now created:






Note that there are a few missions to carry passengers, but most of them are to carry cargo. There is a third type of mission that I have defined, to bring cargo to the point of origin.

Previously these missions were completely randomly generated. Now they are based on a few things. People are more likely to want to leave a city if the moral in that city is low. There eventually will be consequences for that city, but for the time being, there isn't. Next, if there is a surplus of goods, then the desire is to send them to other locations. If there's a high demand and low supply for something, then it tends to request that you bring goods of that type to the city. They also will affect the supply of goods.

While I was going through this, I also overhauled the process of buying/selling goods. For once thing, I noticed that selling goods didn't increase the supply at the location the goods were delivered. I also need to improve the display of missions. The dialog doesn't work well with multiple missions, among other things it doesn't scroll, so for resolution challenged screens not everything can be seen. Last on my list before I can really do a new test build is to improve some algorithm speeds behind the scenes that result in a noticeable lag, particularly when docking with the first city.

Beyond that, I still need to do a lot of tweaking, things like adding new goods. If you would like to help me with that, please do! I have a google form set up to accept suggestions for goods to include. If I receive lots of help, I might even list you in the credits for the game!

4 comments:

  1. The question "What resources are required to produce this good, if any?" in your form doesn't have proper answers.

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    1. Fixed it, thanks! The Good forms creation doesn't have the options look much different than the short entry... Sigh.

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  2. I've pinged a couple through, but I am reading it off of Wikipedia to be honest, although I had a bit of an idea, but filling in the form is going to take a lot of time, as most items were mandatory and there wasn't a "No Sure" / "I don't know" option (I appreciate you want factual/correct info etc)...

    Here's the page I was grabbing some info from... it may be useful...

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_East_India_Company

    A snippet etc:
    "Silver and copper from Japan were used to trade with India and China for silk, cotton, porcelain, and textiles. These products were either traded within Asia for the coveted spices or brought back to Europe."

    Getting more excited about your game each time I read about the next update - not sure if you saw the post on the FB group (Unity) but there was a rather nice little ship crossing the sea... saw it and thought of "cutscenes" or something for your game... wrong type of ship, but created a nice atmosphere with sound effects and so on...

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  3. Thanks for the inputs! I've changed the form to be a bit more friendly, hopefully that will help. I'm hoping to get to working on that maybe in a couple of weeks. Right now I'm trying to track down a way to speed up my pathfinding, which is responsible for a pretty significant slowdown in the game, so... It's still coming along, however! Thanks for all of your support along the way!

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