Dev Blog- Colonial Sea Trader- More UI fixes

This week I continued to work on fixing a number of UI issues that have been shown for some time, but I have put on the back burner until I completed the UI redesign that I've been working on for the last month. The most significant was fixing the line so that it shows above the city labels, as seen here.

A few other issues that I looked in to were to improve the text rendering somewhat, improving performance, testing performance in the normal game mode (And found it to be sufficient), ensured that the top dialog would always be usable, and fixing the way the line is displayed that was poor in a few instances.

This week I'm going to start tackling game play for the first time in a while. Specifically, I've noticed that water is significantly over produced, and I'm hoping to get to the bottom of that. Furthermore, I want to ensure that food is being produced at a reasonable level, and see why luxuries are overproduced. It might take a while, but I'm hoping to get to the bottom of this!

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Dev Blog- Colonial Sea Trader- Polishing dialogs

This week was primarily spent polishing the dialogs edited last week, as well as fixing a few visual bugs. The biggest change was a few upgrades to the cityscape, which you can see below.

Also fixed was a bug that didn't show the correct value of the goods, and other dialog bugs. I will spare you an image of them, trust me, they are there.

This week I want to fix a few visual issues. Basically, those items that appear in world space don't have a consistent look. They sometimes appear behind the ship, sometimes in front of it, and sometimes even between the ship, all of which just don't quite look right! They also don't scale well with size. This week I plan on fixing all of these issues! I'm also hoping to get the website ready to go, however, I'm wanting to try out one additional thing before I'm ready to put it to the test.


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Dev Blog- Colonial Sea Trader- Improving the look, continuing to work on the town layout, starting a website

This week has been an interesting one. I'm continuing to work towards getting it ready to show off. To do so, I improved the look of the mountains and terrain in general, I started working on a website, and continuing to work on the town layout that I've been working on for a few weeks.

Looking at the terrain, I realized that I had made it too flat in appearance. I fixed this, as can be seen above.

I also have started to replace the city layout, as I've mentioned a few times before. You can see how it will roughly look, although I'm continuing to improve it. The next version the buildings will look different, and the city label will contain more information, slightly. I'm fairly confident I can have a fully working version of this by the end of this week!

As mentioned, I started a website. I have a host, and will be continuing to work on improving things further, although I'm still trying to decide exactly what it will look like. Stay tuned, I hope to have something in the next week or two. It will result in a new blog location, and I'm going to try to import everything from this blog to the new one (At least, all of the dev blogs for this game). My Amateur Radio following group will be happy to have this return to it's original purpose!

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Dev Blog- Colonial Sea Trader- Building a city layout

This week I've continued to put together pieces for my city layout tool. I finished building design, and started to layout the city. In the process, I learned how to do something I've long wanted to do, but haven't gotten to yet, namely how to do custom inspectors!

The city layout still isn't quite as I want, I want to do more bitmasking instead of the current layout that I have. I've started work on it, but I just haven't gotten to it yet, I'm hoping to have that done pretty quickly. Assuming I can finish that, I will then add the buildings to the layout, and hopefully have a functioning town!

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Dev Blog- Colonial Sea Trader- Button improvement, Reworking the cityscape

The first thing that I  did this week was to improve the buttons.

I started working this week on improving the dialogs, but I quickly realized that my current ways just weren't cutting it. My first poor attempt ended up as follows:

This just looks hideous, and I started thinking, there has to be a better way. So I thought about it, and made the following sketch:

I showed it around to a few people, and generally they liked they idea. I then started playing around with how to make it work, most notably looking at Kenney's graphics.

I think that kind of style will do. I'm still working on generating these automatically, this one was a bit of a manual pain, but when it's done, I'll have procedurally generated building using Kenney's artwork. I will then decide at a future date if I want to keep going with that, or improve it further. I've toyed with doing some kind of a 3-d model similar to how my world scene is generated, but for now, I'll go with this, and see how it looks.


This week I'm going to work on setting up the city, allowing one to visit places by clicking on them instead of the small buttons that are currently available. I will continue to improve the dialogs. If I have any time beyond those two items, I want to fix the tooltips, that can sometimes appear behind items, and the size is too variable.

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Dev Blog- Colonial Sea Trader- Theming the UI, adding support for localization, lowering reflection

This week I had two major accomplishments. The first was to add localization support. Note that I'm not fully localized yet, but it's coming along. The second was to add a theme system to my game, to allow for easily changing large sets of items to have a particular theme, allowing me to tweak the look of the game. I also toned down the reflection, which was mentioned by many people to be a bit too high for most people's tastes.

So, why localization support? One of the things I decided to do was to change the font in my game. If I was going to do font, I might as well change everything to a Text Mesh Pro. When doing that, it seemed natural to do two other changes that would require touching almost every box in the game, localization and theme support. I added both of these, and have been gradually changing the fonts to support these changes.

I'm content with most of the buttons, although I'm still going to re-work the ones in the lower left, which currently just contains a single button. I haven't decided what I want to do yet with that, which is why I haven't bothered theming it.

The themeing was accomplished by using Scriptable Objects, which I allow for picking a background, font style, font color, and image color.

I'm still trying to figure out exactly how I want the dialogs to look. I haven't figured it out yet, but I'm getting there, slowly.

For this week I'm going to continue to work on the changes from last week, mostly focused on dialogs. I might then take a break from all of this to figure out a website, now that I have a name and am approaching the minimal threshold that I can consider seeking out Steam Greenlight or KickStarter or generally speaking to get the name of my game out there, although a website is really needed to take that next step.

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Dev Blog- Colonial Sea Trader- Yes, it has a name finally! Also, UX improvements

Well, I've been talking about it for ages, and it's finally happened. This is no longer the unnamed Sea Trading Game, it has a real name! And that name is Colonial Sea Trader.

Still working on the artwork, of course, but there it is!

And there's more! I've been working on improving the UI considerably. I've reduced the amount of things on the screen, showing just the important stuff. I've also done the start of an effort to improve all of the dialogs. See the start of it below. Note that there will be tweaks, but it should be something like what you see below.

Other improvements include the start of keyboard shortcuts, which can be expanded easily further,
improvements to the map edges, studying some of the edge cases to improve the display, and starting to do work to improve some of the artwork.

This week I'm planning on continuing the UI updates I did last week, and in general will be working on the polish of the game. I might also improve the tutorial, world creation, and other such things, I haven't decided yet.

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Dev Blog- Sea Trading Game. Let's give it a name, and fix UI stuff.

Well, I've decided to finally give my game a name. Right now I've been floating two titles, "Colonial Sea Trader" and "Columbian Exchange". Perhaps not the most original names, but, hey, it's better than "Unnamed Sea Trading Game" that I've been floating for over a year. I'm quite interested to hear what you have to think of, let me know.

In conjunction with the naming decision, I also released a new video. This will probably be the last one from this channel, I'm going to work on a dedicated channel soon for this game, but I'd like to get it named first.

A few other things that I did:

• I upgraded to Unity 5.6.
• I improved the way the layout changes with resolution, I think it should be more consistent now. I'm going to be improving a few other of the displays as well, but overall...
• I've now made it so the entire screen is visible, and not the the small portion visible before.
• I fixed a number of bugs.
• I have a new camera system in place that I think will take me to the final system. Lines are no longer visible, although I need to improve the cloud system a bit to get it perfected.

My goals for this week are as follows:

• Improve the image display slightly.
• Make my final name decision!
• Numerous bug fixes to make the game feel more like a game.

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Dev Blog- Sea Trading Game- Depicting the wind on screen

The main accomplishment this week was to improve the loading screen, which now looks like this:

I also changed the intro screen, which now looks like this:

I've also been playing around with the angle of the camera. Here's a much steeper angle than is currently shown, just to give you an idea. I haven't decided yet what I will do, but it's at least an interesting perspective. Obviously if I do this then something will have to change with the text, but I'm interested to hear your thoughts.

The last thing I did was to fix a few bugs that have been driving me crazy in regards to dialogs. Principally, I changed the trading goods dialog so it all fits in the window, no more overdrawn images! I also fixed a few issues where certain dialogs wouldn't scroll depending on where the mouse was.

For this week, I'm going to continue to make visual changes. I feel like this is the single most important thing for me to work on, and thus it is my main plan going forward for the next few weeks. Expect lots of UI and graphical changes, and more images than text, for the weeks to come!

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Dev Blog- Sea Trading Game- Loading Screen created!

I finally have a loading screen that actually works, as can be seen below. It took quite a bit of time to get everything running smoothly, but overall I'm quite happy with the progress! Take a look below at how it works!

As with last week, I found a number of other issues while putting this together, and was able to speed up the process a fair bit. There are 3 threads that are involved in creating the world, one that creates the textures, one that creates the world, and a third for the UI updates, which is the least used thread. I'm still going to try and improve it someday, but for now, I'm quite content.

This week I'm going to do some bug fixes, and probably some more graphical improvements. I'm hoping to get a reasonable demo of the game done soon, and maybe even a name!

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Dev Blog- Sea Trading Game- Continuing conditions, reaction to similar game

This has been an interesting week. I was able to fix a number of annoying bugs, although I still have a few more to squash in the process. But more than that, I was able to get the game to actually work, including a "You Win!" alert that can appear! Note that the final version will have a sandbox mode, but it will also have some missions, if nothing else than for the tutorial.

The main thing I did this week was to improve the dialog displaying the victory conditions. I'm still trying to decide exactly what I want it to do, but I can greatly improve it once I have the decision made on exactly what I want to do with this dialog. It is coming along, slowly, however.

One of the big things I did this week was to look in to a similar game that has just been released, Winds of Trade. I've known about this game for about 8 months, which was about 6 months after I started my own project. Those early looks, well, I wasn't discouraged too much. When I first looked at the released version, however, I became a bit discouraged, I will admit. In a lot of ways, it is the game that I set out to make when I first started. But the more I've looked in to it, the more I realize that while it is certainly in the same space, and has a lot of the same features, there are quite a few differences, and I think those differences will make a huge difference in the feel of the game overall. In the end, I've decided to study the game, learn from it, possibly including a few similar UI/UX type features, but in the end, my game will be different than it will be. One thing that I have been convinced of as a result, however, is to defer my game a bit until I've made it better, and that when released, it should be of a similar quality level, if not higher, than Winds of Trade.

This next week I'm continuing the conditions, and tutorial fixes. I'm going to also start working on squashing some bugs that have been on my plate for a while.

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Dev Blog- Sea Trading Game- Ship supplies lifetime indicated, speed improvements, cursor shown, bug fixes!

This has been a productive week, showing a number of new features. I'm hopefully two small steps away from adding the game over conditions, at which time I'll be at an "alpha" state, and will start doing more formal testing!

I added a cursor this week, as well as an indicator as to how long your supplies will last. The color of the line changes depending on how long your supplies will last relative to the expected length of the voyage. I'm also probably going to change the cursor, but it'll serve for the time being.

I fixed a few speed issues, so the game now takes less memory and runs faster. It is now running at a similar speed to how it was several months ago, despite adding quite a few new complex features!

I also improved the display of the icons showing what goods are being grown, as can be seen below:

This week I'm hoping to get the game over conditions, which will basically occur if your crew gets to the point that they are wanting to revolt because you haven't fed or paid them. More similar details will occur, but that's the general idea for how the game will end. I'm also hoping to get the starting conditions better set, and possibly work on some improvements to the brokerage system.

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Ludum Dare 37- "Jewel Defender" Post Mordem

I recently participated in my first Ludum Dare, making the game "Jewel Defender" over a 48 hour period (I spent about 10 hours of actual work on it). In this article I want to document the process of making it, I will probably do a separate article on what I plan to do post-Ludum Dare as a result of feedback. You can download it at the link on the Ludum Dare page.

Jewel Defender is a tower defense style game, but purely using melee traps. I had the time to include two traps, one that is a swinging sword, the other a block drop.

The theme was "One Room". I went in to this Ludum Dare either wanting to do a prototype of a game I had previously had in mind, or a prototype of something that I could use for my Sea Trading Game that I've been working on for some time. I decided to try out an idea that I had long had of making a game where you set traps to defend a few high value artifacts, namely gems.

Friday I was able to spend an hour on the project, which was enough for me to test navigation meshes. I had not previously done any work with the Unity AI system, and learned a lot in that process. Early versions were problematic, as can be seen below.

The major obstacle I faced was getting collisions to work correctly. I often had traps that wouldn't trigger, or objects wouldn't be placed that were supposed to, as can be seen below. I finally found that certain objects needed RigidBodies, while others didn't need them. With the right combinations of rigidbodies, I was able to make everything work right!

I slept Saturday evening with a single trap, decent looking graphics, but objects still weren't being placed as they should be.

My time on Sunday was quite limited, but I spent most of it just getting my traps to be placed right. I made an actual score, and got the building cost of making traps set. I ran in to what at first appeared to be a Unity bug, but ended up being me accidentally placing an animator on my walls, which moved my collider for some reason!

I also added the ability to destroy traps, otherwise one could simply set up a massive wall of traps and keep anything from practically winning. I threw in a few sound effects, and overall was happy with the game, although I really wanted to have more traps set up, along with more robots trying to take the gems.

I wasn't able to spend as much time on this as I would have liked, because I was sick for the entire duration of the event. Not really sick, but enough that I wasn't at 100%, and had to take frequent brakes. Sunday evening I had finally worked out the bugs in the simple version, and initially submitted to Ludum Dare with only a single trap type, but 4 hours to spare. I slept for a few hours, and then realized I still had motivation to do one more trap type, which ended up being the swinging sword.

I can tell from my play through of the game that it isn't very balanced, it is very difficult early on, and surprisingly easy later on, if you can make it that far. If I had more time, I would have improved that balance some.

What I would really like to know is if I should persue this as a game, particularly in comparison with my much further advanced Sea Trading Game that I have been working on for the entire year. What do you think? Leave a comment to let me know!

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Dev Blog- Sea Trading Game. New Hold Design in action, fixing viewer

This has been a busy week, mostly in making the following dialog work again, with it's new format. This involved finishing the code rewrite I was working on last week, adding a bunch of new stuff, and making sure the barrels somewhat fit the locations given. I'm working on a new selection system that you can see a very early prototype of on the right hand side as well, more to be coming on that soon. I'm also likely to change how the ship is oriented.

The 3 items on the right are there for testing purposes, but eventually they will be selectable options on what type of cargo to take on. This will most apply to passengers, who will be placed in cabins of various types, although it might apply in other locations as well, I haven't fully decided yet.


Just to give you an idea, this is what the ship currently looks like when completely full (Without the pretty background added for the above, sorry!)

It's rough, but more than adequate for my needs at the moment. I'll improve the ship background at some point in time, as well as improving the placement a bit, but for now...

I also set in motion a few behind the scenes things that will allow me to do a rotated camera view. This is an example of what it might look like, but I'm not finished at the moment.

So, what do you think? In particular, what do you think about the new dialog to put goods in the ship? Any other feedback?

This week my plan is to get buying/selling goods fully formed, and then try to get the camera rotation fully working. I should also start adding goods again. I'm also going to work on improving the current "lovely" diagram for selecting what goods to buy. I'm also going to improve a few object placement issues, where certain objects should be on top of other objects.

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Game Dev- Sea Trading Game. Promo Video, improved graphics, new path forward!

I ended up doing a number of things differently this week than I expected, but overall I'm quite happy with what I was able to achieve. I created my first simple video play-through, updated the ship graphics (Thanks Kenney!), added more goods, spent time thinking about the goods that I do need to add, and overall prioritized my plan. But first, my demo video!



I'm planning on doing another version of it soon, with a lot more thought put in to it, but I'm going to work on some graphical improvements first. Which brings me to my second point, I've decided to change how I'm doing updates to the game. Specifically, I'm going back to a para-dime that I had some time ago, namely that of spending a few weeks working on UI improvements, and a few weeks working on behind the scenes changes. At this point in time, I'm going to work on the UI changes. I'm still going to continue to add goods, I have quite the list of them, but I'm going to save those to a few per week, focusing more on the other items.

I also added a ship graphic at last! I took the advice of Rick Davidson and using graphic assets that are out there already. I'm also going to make a few differences in how things are displayed, see the previous paragraph.

Lastly, I added a number of goods, as I have been doing for some time. Potatoes, Cucumbers, Onions, and Carrots are among the items that have been added.

The biggest thing on the plate for this week is updating the way the ship stores goods. I've been thinking for a long time that I really don't like the way that goods are stored on the ship. I've decided on a few changes. First of all, I will change the holds store goods. The primary unit of reference will be barrels. There will be an above deck portion of the ship that larger goods can be stored, as well as animals, and smaller unit space goods will be stored in the hold.

Sea Trading Game. Improving sell/buy pricing, producing goods at "factory" locations, and starting to manufacture seeds

This was another week with relatively few easily visible changes, but those changes are quite critical! The changes include manufacturing at "factories", which previously did not work correctly, manufacturing "seeds", which will allow one to make seeds if there is not sufficient raw goods to form an object.


Seed production was the biggest change, and the most complex one. They are required for situations in which a city wants to make cotton clothing of some kind, I will need Cotton. In order to make Cotton, I need to plant it, which will produce "raw cotton", and that "raw cotton" will then be converted to usable cotton, by removing the seeds from the useful fibers. Previous to this week, I could only produce goods that directly satisfied a need, now I am able to produce the materials required to manufacture such goods. I am still not completely done with this, while I have seen it work somewhat, it doesn't work as well as the other good production works. In addition, there is no demand for seeds, which seems to not be realistic. I'm still working out exactly how I'm going to do all of this, stay tuned!

One of the most positive changes was improving how goods are sold. Previously, it was possible to have even valuable goods that aren't in demand at the moment to sell for 0. This isn't realistic at all. I was able to fix the system. Buying a good and selling it in the same port will lose you some money, but not everything you originally invested.

I'm still working through how a lot of things are going to work out. I think I'm going to re-design the ship hold system sooner than later, as it's becoming more of a pain, although I can't promise I will work on that this week. The critical thing I believe is to finish the systems I added this past week, to get them working as expected.

Lastly, I'm starting to think about putting together a promo video. I would be interested in any tips that anyone out there might have. Thanks for all of your support, you guys are awesome!

Sea Trading Game- Improving selection of goods to produce, more goods.

This week was much like the previous week. I continued to refine both the model of growing crops as well as adding more goods, and refining existing goods. I also made use of the regional modifier, as used for minerals.

The first thing that I added was a capability to see what a city was doing. Specifically, I told the game to place an icon on the tile to show what was being produced on that tile. As of right now, I don't actually have any icons drawn, but I am using a simple standard icon to show the difference. This code is very inefficient at the moment, but I'm working on improving it.

Right now the dot is rather small, I'll tweak the size of it when I have actual icons to be used, I recognize that what is seen right now is really small. I'll figure out a way to improve the speed of this as well, but for right now I'm leaving it slow because it helps me in debugging the game.

I started to balance the game a bit as well, to make sure that crops were being developed appropriately. For instance, Gold is now produced only in certain locations, although it can be quite highly available in those locations. There is a generic "food" gathering capability, which will give food for local population, think gathering berries, hunting, etc, and the more generic crop growth, which will give much more food, albeit at less frequent times.

Some crops are currently growing, primarily tobacco. Tobacco is interesting because it is used primarily for recreation, and it is the easiest to produce of the goods that I have for "luxury" usage. I'll no doubt be adding more, but I'm primarily focusing on food crops for now.

Bottom line is, the game is continuing to make slow steady progress. This week I plan on ensuring that goods can be produced that aren't dependent on a tile, such as clothing. I'm going to look at the buying/selling price at a port to make sure it seems reasonable. And lastly, I'm going to start looking at including demand for goods that aren't directly required. For instance, Wool is required to make Clothing, but Wool by itself isn't particularly useful. Right now Wool won't be produced, because it isn't directly required.

Sea Trading Game- Adding new goods. modeling real-world agriculture.

This week has started something that I've been wanting to get to for a long time, adding new goods! I started to test my various systems, including the use of seeds, tools, and working on modeling livestock. I didn't actually change a lot this week, although what I did change allowed me to see what some of the problems I'm currently faced with, and work to tackling those issues.

I've thought for some time that I wanted to model something like the Columbian Exchange, which was the process that brought goods in from across the globe. Rubber was found in Brazil, tobacco in Mexico, potatoes in the Andes, horses, sheep, and cows in the Western Hemisphere. These, and many more, were moved across the globe, such that now these foods, and animals, are grown across the globe. This week, I started to make progress towards that goal.

I've been focusing on Agriculture for the beginning. Having procedurally generated seeds is proving to be interesting. I know that Civilization has different "Luxury" goods that are randomly placed throughout the globe in regions. I wanted to do something similar to this, and I've got a system that I think has at least started it.

In doing research for this, I've learned a lot of things. First of all, many of the plants that we have are combinations of plants from different locations. Some crops existed in both the Americas and Asia, like cotton. Others only existed in one region, like rubber. I've got a system in place that will set these up at least initially, I'm struggling to make sure it will work for a longer term game, but it's coming along slowly. What my preference would be at this point is to have many goods such that each area has it's own unique type, although how well that will work I'm still determining.

One of the most useful resources has been this data sheet on plant growing seasons and locations in the United States from Cornell University. Every one of these plants will be included. I expect I will also include other plants as well that aren't commonly grown in the United States. I'm still working on how to get this to model fruit growth, which will follow a different system. Seasons will matter in this game, it will dictate the availability and demand of goods!

I did a bit of revision to my biome table. The key difference is that desert is less common than it was before, which is replaced by grasslands. This has a small effect, here's a randomly generated map you can see below. Desert is much rarer than it was previously, although I will likely still do some tweaking to that. I'm using an Arizona State University provided Biome Map as a reference to my game database to determine what grows where.

So far I have several eatable plants, sheep, wool, and cotton that I've started to think in more detail about how they should work. I've also started to work with rubber, although I'm still trying to figure out the usage of that for the time period that I'm working with, it was only really made useful in the 1800s, although it was in some use prior to that time. I think before I move too much more forward I'm going to work on first manufactured goods (Clothing most likely), then think through mining and trees more, and resolve a few issues that have come up as I've started to increase my database of goods more. I'm hoping to have these resolved soon, so I can proceed.

One thing that I thought long and hard about over the week, and I'm starting to get a better idea, is how to make the ship loading and configuration easier to use. I've decided to drastically limit the options of cargo hold types, including some that can only be placed on the top deck of the ship. It's coming along slowly, although I'm probably not going to do a ton of work on that at the moment, I might rename a few of the hold types, and possibly change graphics, accordingly. The main purpose of this change is to allow for the transportation of livestock, which will primarily be done on the top deck of the ship, as was done historically. Large cargo will also only be carried on the top of the ship. Barrels will be the primary cargo contained below decks, which will replace crates.

The crew of the ship also gave me a lot of thought. Right now I have crew as a single person, with a few attributes. I'm thinking that I will actually allow for the entire ship to be staffed, by looking at bios for potential candidates in each port. These sailors will stay for some time, some might only be for a single port, others might stay for a few voyages, and still others might stay for life.

Lastly, I've been thinking of ship based needs. This will include food and water, both for cargo (Livestock and passengers), as well as the crew. There will also be items for use during the voyage, and how that will work I'm not quite sure yet, but likely tar, sails, weapons, etc will be of some use during the voyage. Fishing will be a rare occurrence, although it will be something that can be a task that the crew will attempt, they likely won't get huge hauls (Unless the ship is configured for fishing, which will be a huge set up upgrades I'll get to some day). I'm trying to think of how these will be monitored, and I'm starting to come up with a system, although it will still need some time to come to full fruition.

I do want to add that I'm not sure how much I'm going to follow reality, but I'm going to try to do it as much as I can, because I think modeling reality will in the end make things more interesting. World history is interesting, and I think making a game that mimics the aspect of bringing goods from one part of the world to others is interesting. 

Bottom line is, I didn't actually do a whole lot this week, but what I did was able to help change the direction a bit of the game towards a useful end. I think I found a lot of issues now that will save me a lot of time in the future, and make a more interesting game!

Sea Trading Game- Distributing seeds, goods

One of the biggest things that I've been struggling with is how to distribute the initial set of skills, and seeds. Historically, plants really only existed in a small area of the world, and were distributed from there to other locations. Domesticated animals were fairly easy to transport, and often moved significantly from place to place. Skills often existed in only a few particular locations, although they often could be spread significantly from place to place. How was I to model this?

What I decided to do is to allow for a number of "seed" locations. The seeds will only exist in certain biomes. The seeds are given to certain cities to start with. There are a number of locations that is specified to create each seed. The seed generation is set to have each city have a good chance of having a seed. Skills work in the exact same way.

I'm still trying to decide how to transfer these seeds from place to place. As it stands right now, the seeds will only exist in a single location, although I'm probably going to allow for seeds to spread to nearby cities, although exactly how close I haven't determined yet.

I also worked on speeding the game up, and was able to fix a few long-standing issues to speed the game up. See the results below.

As of right now, I have one last objective to go until I can start populating goods. That objective is to allow for using multiple input files, to spread out the load a bit easier, allowing me to share XML files between configurations.

Once that happens, I can start mass producing goods! I've been playing a free game called Dwarf Fortress recently, and through it been thinking about how I want to have goods actually work. I've long been wanting to have a huge system of potential goods, and I think I have a better idea of how to make it work after playing DF. Still working out a few details, but it is most certainly coming along!

Sea Trading Game- New look, UI Design, including new look, use of tool tips, and single ship.

This, as promised, has been a week where I focused on the UI, as opposed to adding new features. I have made considerable changes, and I'm happy with what I'm seeing.

The biggest change was that the UI is now improved. You can see how things look below. In particular, note that one can now see a mini-view of the ship in the upper right hand corner. In addition, moving the mouse over objects will show information about that tile. I'm still trying to get some of the information more compact, but it is working for now at least.

There also have been a number of less visible changes. I changed some of the back end UI elements that make maintaining labels for cities easier. It also improved the look for when those labels overlap. I've pushed out the name of the captain, and the cash each ship has, to the front screen.

Coming next I'm hoping to improve the way the tooltip works. I've got a better idea of how to do things, but I haven't gotten there quite yet, it will take some work. I'm also working on improving the hold selection process.