Much progress made
Finally getting one out.
Okay, having a crack at writing the first devlog - let's see how this goes.
Hey pilots! 👋
It's been a wild wild couple of months, and I honestly wish I had had more time to dedicate to communicating with you all on the amazing progress on Wayfallen, but, this being a solo effort and all, I'm often at a crossroads between churning out more code and features and writing what's been previously done - guess which one tends to win 😅 That's no excuse though, so here's me trying to do a proper write-up of what's been going on, highlighting all the juicy bits (and skipping the gazillion other bits that contribute to the overall experience but may not pique your interest as much).
Economy
Dynamic pricing
We've now got dynamic pricing for commodities - each station will now set their own prices for buying/selling, based on their storage amounts vs capacity. This means that a data drives factory will sell data drives to you at a lower price if their stock is building up and no one is buying from them. It also means they will buy advanced circuits from you at a lower price if they already have other freighters bringing advanced circuits to them, since they're less dependent on you.
This makes finding lucrative trade routes more interesting, and markets will saturate if you over-exploit them.
And this also means you can sabotage markets by attacking incoming freighters, e.g. if you harass traders that are bringing advanced circuits to that data drives factory, it will start buying them at a steeper price from you since it has a shortage of input materials to continue its operations.
Market UI / Station UI
I've also re-designed the station UI (actually the entire game's UI, but here we're talking about the economy so...). Maybe not final or anything, but it's still a huge improvement.
It shows for each commodity the amount at the station, the incoming amount from freighters who have "promised" to sell at this station, and the outgoing amount for freighters who have already "promised" to buy commodities here.
You can buy/sell at this screen when docked at the station.
Trader NPC Improvements
I've spent a lot of time improving the performance of the code that handles trade-route-seeking for NPC traders - i.e. searching through all their known stations to figure out which ones need commodity X, and which ones are selling X, and picking the right combination and executing on it. I now feel comfortable with the performance and can see it scale to many thousands of ships easily.
I've also added a "trade routes" overlay on the map so we can easily visualize where trade is happening (see the image).
NPC traders are logically split into local, importer and exporter, so that they are more ordered in how they search for trade routes, with the more massive freighters taking on longer routes.
Pathing has been a long-standing issue - traders always went straight from point A to point B. This didn't allow them to avoid hot conflict zones / known pirate ambushes / etc. With some pain, I've now implemented A* pathfinding for traders, which means they now plot their route and avoid conflict - so if there are major battles in a region, they will properly take a longer route around it and not rush in to their death.
Spaceships and combat
Did a massive overhaul on weapons, rebalanced the existing ones and added a bunch more weapons. We have around 70 weapons in the game at this point. Weapons for different ship sizes / roles, built by different factions so they have their faction's "style".
Some time after the initial weapons overhaul, I also further reworked missiles to look and feel nicer to play with.
Ship mass now properly takes cargo into consideration in physics / damage calculations. So this means a ship that's loaded with heavy iron ore will visibly feel heavier to pilot - and you can dump cargo to have a better chance at escaping pirates (and NPC traders do that sometimes).
Added ship modules - mostly-passive systems that go into ship module slots on a ship and provide benefits, e.g. an engine mod module might give far better turn rate while slightly losing out on some thrust power. Some active systems as well, such as asteroid scanner, flow disruptor, etc.
Space Environment
Each sector can now be a potential solar system.
Some sectors will just be empty / barren corners of space.
Some will have lone stars with nothing else.
Others will have planets will different biomes orbiting those stars.
Currently it's mostly just cosmetic - but lays the groundwork for future systems that may be built on top of this to allow interaction with planets/suns.
Space Stations
Did some huge work on getting space stations to be modular so that the player can build their own custom stations and add to them over time.
So stations are now fully modular - we have different module types that can be chained together to build stations, e.g. docking bays, various types of storage modules, battery modules, factory modules, etc.
Station construction begins with a Core module, and then you add more modules attached to it on all sides. If the Core module gets destroyed, the entire station blows up.
Performance
In a game of this scale, performance is always an uphill battle - so a huge chunk of my time goes into improving the performance of our existing systems and also doing multiple passes on newly-built systems to ensure they don't cause regression to our game performance.
I've migrated a lot of our graphics rendering to a different pipeline to have even faster performance so we can simulate even more tiny points in the economy, more trade, more factions and diplomacy, more planets, more asteroids, more stations, more spaceships, moar lasers, moar explosions, MOAR DAKKA!!!1
A lot more that I haven't covered, but these should be enough - for now. :)
This was more of a huge dump of what's been accomplished the last few months. I'm hoping to fall into a more measured cadence and perhaps go into more depth on specific features as we build them out - but we'll see what works, in time.
Wish you all the best 🚀
Comms out.
-Wayfarer