Reading our devlogs on a weekly basis gives you a good idea about what we are currently up to. It is easy though to lose sight of the big picture and our medium term goals. With this devlog we want to recap what happened in the last months and what happens next.

In July last year we have been able to finally share the good news with you: Our application for funding from the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action has been greenlit (devlog #393). The application consisted of three major parts:

• A German translation of the game and related pages
  
• Part one of the politics extension: parliaments and motions
  
• Part two of the politics extension: infrastructure
  

• Local rules: So far, the local rules can only be changed by the governor. We want to move this system over into the new governments
  
• Population infrastructure: Motions will allow to change the target levels
  
• Government programs: These will also be a responsibility of the government
  
• Access to the FX: Since governments have their own accounting now, we want to allow motions to create buy and sell orders on the FX markets
  
• Payout: A payout motion will allow to transfer government funds to a player
  
• Fees: The government will also be able to control production, warehouse and local market fees via motions
  

• Space elevators that allow to transfer cargo to the surface/orbit without using a ship
  
• Beacons that allow faster STL or FTL travel
  
• "Hyperlanes" that open up new FTL connections
  

New Features

[h2]German translation - Willkommen![/h2]

APEX is now available in German. That makes German, after English, the second officially supported language.



The logout button has been replaced with a drop down menu. It hosts the audio mute button as well as a new component that allows to switch between English and German.

The tutorial and wiki sections of the handbook have been translated as well.

We also added German subtitles to the introduction tutorials on YouTube.

See you in APEX!

Dear Licensees!

As 2023 draws to a close, we'd like to take a moment to reflect on the year and provide a brief glimpse into what lies ahead in 2024.

Our journey in 2023 began with a makeover of the new player experience. As outlined in various devlogs, if we want to increase the amount of players, we have two options: spend more marketing money to get more players into the game, or try to keep players engaged for longer. Our work on the new player experience falls into the second category. We transitioned from a single UI tour to a system of tours that is interconnected with introductory contracts provided by faction agents. The tours introduce major game mechanics, like the UI, contracts, flights, trading and so on. With the help of SeaPear we also replaced the old tutorial videos with brand-new ones! All in all, this makeover was very successful, we saw a significant improvement in the retention of new players!

A project that wasn't as successful was the UI refresh. Given that we are still using a design that Martin and I came up with during the early days of Prosperous Universe, it really is time to let someone who knows what they are doing re-design the UI. We found someone and even started to redo some of the UI components, but eventually the project was put on hold in favor of more pressing matters. We haven't given up on the UI refresh though and hope to finish the project some time in the future.

In March, we introduced the first Monthly Economic Report. At the time, players suggested to create some sort of report to gain more insights into the economy. We liked the idea, but due to our limited dev-time couldn't make this an in-game feature. Instead, each month we publish a screenshot from our internal tool that tracks this kind of data. The reports now live on the forums.

In May Nick posted his final devlog as he, unfortunately, left the company. Lena and Michi assumed his marketing duties, concentrating on influencer marketing mainly on YouTube, but also Twitch. Performance marketing, which had not proven effective for us, is currently on hold.

Martin said it himself: Something's up when he makes an appearance in a devlog. In July he announced the good news. The Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action has greenlit a new Prosperous Universe project. We have been keeping it secret up until that point, when we were able to secure the funding. The project consists of three major parts: a German translation, a politics update and an infrastructure update. The German translation is a requirement to get the funding, but it has been on our wishlist for a long time anyways. With the politics update we want to introduce a new politics system that allows more participation by the general player base and finally gets rid of the shortfalls players experience with the governor system. The third part will introduce new infrastructure projects and will also change how infrastructure is built and operated.

With the Liquidity Release, a major update has seen the light of day in July as well. It brought a host of new features. We introduced Leaderboards where players can compare themselves with others in many different categories, like amount of bases, ships, HQ level and most interestingly the production output for individual commodities and resources. The APEX representation center is a "show-off" feature that allows investing hard-earned currency to show your wealth to the universe. Another feature that has been received very well are loan contract templates. These extend the existing contract features and allow to hand out customized loans to other players. Especially new players profit from these, and it can speed up the early game quite a bit. The full release notes are available on the forums.

After the summer break we started to work on the German translation. We decided that it is not enough to "just" translate the game itself, but everything around it as well. That includes the website, the account system, the handbook and the Steam page. Although we planned ahead and added support for additional translations when we started Prosperous Universe this turned out to be more work than anticipated. We are happy to announce that the translation is done, and we'll be able to release it early next year.

Recently, work began on the second major milestone of the new project: politics. We envision a context system that allows players to switch back and forth between their company context and any government contexts that they might have. This allows players to have a separate set of screens for each context, creating a clear boundary between the company and the government tasks. We are halfway through with the implementation of the context system.

This brings us neatly to the tasks that lie ahead in 2024. As already mentioned, we will deploy the German translation early next year and with that out of the way we can focus on finishing the context system. This will be the foundation for the development of the politics system. Instead of having a single governor that rules without much oversight we'll introduce parliaments that can consist of multiple players. Everything from setting the taxes to outsource upkeep contracts for the infrastructure will be managed and voted upon with motions. These motions and the corresponding votes will be public so interested players can gain insight what their government does. We'll also remove the rule that restricts a player to only be governor of one planet at a time. Players can be member of parliament on multiple planets at the same time, allowing more participation in the political system.

We will also increase our marketing activity to try to bring in more new players. We are currently sitting at around 5000 monthly active players and hope to increase that number significantly.

As we look forward to an exciting 2024 with new updates, we're grateful to have you with us! The entire team wishes you Happy Holidays and a Happy New Year!

The Liquidity update introduces new loan templates for private contracts, an updated company rating system and leaderboards!

If your APEX console is stuck in a loading state after the update, please make sure to refresh it once after the update to ensure you got the latest version.

[h2]New Features[/h2]

[h3]Leaderboards[/h3]
Under the new LEAD command, you will find a variety of leaderboards. Finally you can track your progress and compare it to other players!

[h3]APEX Representation Center[/h3]
One of the new leaderboards refers to the APEX Representation Center, which is a new show-off feature accessible via the ARC command. Invest currency to upgrade your ARC and compare your status across the whole universe!

[h3]Loan Contract Templates[/h3]
New custom contract templates in CONTD allow you to create loan contracts.

[h3]Improved Company Ratings[/h3]
Each company now has only one rating instead of three. The new single rating is based on how much contract value players actually fulfill of the contracts they close. This means the rating takes into account the monetary value at stake. For example a 10,000 NCC loan will actually impact the rating much more than buying a handful of rations for 500 NCC.

[h2]Changes[/h2]

• Recent contract partners are now shown as suggested recipients of contract drafts in CONTD.
  
• Relevant locations from active contracts (e.g. pick-up or delivery) are now auto-suggested as destinations in ship flight controls (SFC).
  
• The destination selection in SFC now shows suggestions when the input field is focused, without having to type any characters.
  
• When planning a route in SFC you will now see a percentage of how much fuel will be used.
  
• The Building Repair Assistant (BRA) now optionally takes a base address as an parameter and will then open with that base pre-selected in the drop-down.
  
• BRA is now available as a context command in BS and BBL of each base (with the respective base address as a parameter).
  
• FIN now uses endless scrolling and can display more than 100 bookings.
  
• When trying to fulfill a condition on a contract where termination was requested by one of the parties, the game will now display a warning and require a confirmation.
  
• New players (in their first week of playing) will now be warned about investing commodities into population infrastructure projects.
  
• Increased CX order size limit.
  

• HBB: 15 14 area
  
• HBC: 20 17 area
  
• HBM: 22 20 area
  
• HBL: 25 22 area
  

• BDE: input 75 PG 60 PG
  
• BSE: duration 0.25 days 0.22 days
  

• INS: output 20 24
  
• HSE: duration 0.65 days 0.4 days
  

• PIB: output 10 12 (duration 0.65 days 0.7 days)
  
• HOP: output 15 18
  
• GRA: output 5 6
  

• Increased max. g factor provided by high-g seats
  
• Reduced fuel usage of advanced and hyperthrust STL engine
  
• Increased thrust of hyperthrust STL engine
  
• Increased charge speed of high- and hyper-power FTL reactors
  
• Increased effectiveness of heat and whipple shields
  
• Ship repairs now use 25% fewer hull plates and shields, but also require SSC
  

• Fixed BRA sometimes not being able to grab the correct building data. It should now consistently work for all bases.
  
• Fixed command search not working for words at the beginning of a command description.
  
• Fixed insufficient storage space error message not showing when trying to delete a CX order.
  
• Fixed faction contracts sometimes requiring the provisioning of 0 units of a commodity.
  Implemented snapshotting for several additional actors to improve performance and loading times.
  

Martin

These days, you know something's up when yours truly makes an appearance on the devlog. And this time is no different: Today I finally received an email I had been desperately waiting for weeks. It contained the very good news that our next funding project had been green-lit by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action. For obvious reason, we hadn't talked about this at all so far, but now I can finally spill the beans: As you have probably guessed, said project is a Prosperous Universe project again. I won't go into details now - those will follow at a later time - but I can already tell you that the working title has both "politics" and "infrastructure" in the name. Believe me when I say that I am beyond excited about these news. It means that we continue to work on Prosperous Universe to bring it ever-closer to the vision we have for this game!

Michi (molp)

I started working on the last big feature for the upcoming Liquidity Release: templates for custom loan contracts. We will provide three different templates that can be used with the `CONTD` command to create loan contracts.

The first loan template I tackled was a simple interest loan, where the lender pays out the whole sum at the beginning. The borrower will have to pay back installments that are only made up of the interest. The final installment will contain the full borrowed sum. In the video below you can see a first iteration of that template:



It is also the start of a new month, and that means it is time for a new monthly economic report!

Click the image for the full report

Fabian (Counterpoint)

In line with the changes mentioned in last week's devlog, I tweaked some of the higher-tier ship-building materials to be not quite as heavy. In some cases they could negate their advantage in power by creating a much heavier ship, now they're a bit closer to the rest.

Additionally, as another small buff for shields, ship repairs will change to require fewer hull plates and shields (by 25%), but in turn also require Structural Spacecraft Components. This should also help create a more continuous demand for those.

Other than that just lots of cleanup tasks for the upcoming release last week, such as handbook and wiki updates and small fixes.

As always: we'd love to hear what you think: join us on Discord or the forums!

Happy trading!

Michi (molp)

I am back from a short vacation, so naturally there is not much I can talk about this week. Except! There is a new release upcoming, and we finally can share what it will entail!



You can find all the details in the respective Release Notes topic on the forums!

It is also the start of a new month, and that means it is time for a new monthly economic report!


Click the image for the full report

I haven't been able to add new categories this time, but will do so for the next report!

Fabian (Counterpoint)

Today I want to talk a bit about a rework of the company rating system that will be a part of the Liquidity release.

Currently, every company's rating has 3 sub-scores: activity, reliability and stability. We've been getting feedback on these for a long time now, mainly that high reliability (i.e. a high percentage of fulfilled, and therefore not breached, contracts) is by far the most important factor for almost all players. Activity on the other hand is seen more as an "interesting trivia" piece of information and "stability" is easily the most obscure one that's rarely every considered for any decisions.

In the future, there will only be one rating, and no more sub-scores. In short, we will "double down" on the idea of the previous reliability sub-score, but take into account the value of each individual contract. The old reliability rating only cared about "fulfilled contracts" and ignored whether said contract was buying 3 rations or 300 prefabs. In the future, the latter contract will be much more impactful for your overall rating, since the value of conditions involving either currency or materials (i.e. "something of value") changing owners will be considered. As a side note, this will be especially important for the new loan contract templates we're introducing, since these are even more well-defined "pure value" exchanges than e.g. buying or selling commodities.

Your company rating will then be determined by how much the contracts you fulfilled were actually worth (versus the contracts you breached). Of course a few other mechanisms will stay in place to e.g. ensure we take a healthy mix of different contract partners into account and also don't only just consider the most valuable contracts ever to give the ratings a bit of recency.

However, the overall idea is to simplify the ratings by getting rid of superfluous elements, while also making them more meaningful and useful to players at the same time by placing more weight on fulfilling more valuable obligations. As usual, let us know your thoughts on these upcoming changes in the forums!

As always: we'd love to hear what you think: join us on Discord or the forums!

Happy trading!

Michi (molp)

I mentioned last week, that I started implementing a new feature, and I can finally show some pictures! It is part of a larger endeavor towards leaderboards.

Leaderboards have been requested many times in the past, as competitive players want to know how they are doing in comparison to other players. So far, the game doesn't support that directly. There are some community tools that do it indirectly by showing stats like the amount of bases for example.

Instead of getting started with leaderboards with an existing metric, we decided to use a new feature we call APEX Representation Center. Here is the description:

The APEX Representation Center allows companies and corporations to donate some of their profits to the APEX foundation. The foundation uses the money to supply new and upcoming CEOs with the necessary capital and ships to start their entrepreneurial journey. Having a high representation level is widely recognized as a testimony of wealth and success.

There will be a new command called ARC, where companies can contribute towards the APEX Representation Center. The current level will be visible in the company info command CO.



Corporations can build an APEX Representation Center as a corporation project.



Recently a player brought up the topic of economic reports in the forums. While we agree, that these could be very interesting, we don't have development capacity at the moment to implement such reports as an in-game feature. Instead, we could utilize the internal tools we have to generate a report. It could look like this for example.



Please let us know in the forums if that is something you'd be interested in!

Nick

Last week I reported that we were launching on LootBoy, an app that gives players discounts and boots game discoverability. We did indeed go live on Wednesday, and we already have a good many sign-ups! Fingers crossed that this continues to bring in new players to experience the game.

I also have contracted a few more influencers for the coming months, so please look forward to those videos, which I will share when they are made available. The new trailer for PrUn is still being worked on, and I will be busy fleshing out the script and coordinating with the art director and other members of the team in order to have something really special to show off when the project is completed.

As always: we'd love to hear what you think: join us on Discord or the forums!

Happy trading!

Original Post: Development Log #379

Michi (molp)

I was finally able to finish the implementation of what we call the new player journey. If you haven't been following the devlogs lately, you can read up what it is and what we want to achieve with it in the last few devlogs.

While the first three parts of the milestone were about implementation of faction contracts, new screens and UI tours, the last part was about cross-cutting concerns and clean up.

If you set up your company in the last year or two, you might remember the HINT command. It basically opens a buffer with a helpful comment once in a while when you reach certain milestones in the game. Since pretty much everything that was covered by the hint system is now in the UI tours and respective faction contracts, we removed the HINT command entirely.

Another change we implemented is that the status of the tours is now reset when the respective company is being liquidated. We did this because the faction contracts that go hand in hand with the tours have monetary and material rewards that can be used to get a second/third production building way faster than before. We think shortening the time to the next production building is a great motivator for new players to stay in the game. If a player restarts though, it would be unfair to not give these benefits again, just because the tours do not reset.

Unrelated to the tours, but not unrelated to the factions, is another change I implemented this week: generated faction shipping contracts now prefer routes to the closest commodity exchange for new players. That will make the shipping contracts more attractive and lucrative, since new players need to bring their products to the commodity exchange for sale and replenish their consumables in any case.

The maintenance release is now live, you can find the release notes in the forums.

Nick

Last week we had one of our latest influencer videos release from YouTuber Kokoplays MB. You can check out the video here. We think he did a great job at explaining the game to new players and highlighting what makes it special. I hope to get more influencers like this in the future that will put more time and investment into the game before doing a video.

In other news, there is a new Name THAT Planet poll where you can vote for your favorite unnamed planet to receive is own special moniker. If your planet is not already mentioned, just post a comment below and I will add it to the list. May the odds be ever in your favor!

As always: we'd love to hear what you think: join us on Discord or the forums!

Happy trading!

Michi (molp)

I want to share the progress of our UI refresh project with you this week. As a disclaimer, please note that this is work in progress and by no means finished yet.

Have a look at this screen from the current version of the UI. It serves as a reference to see the differences between old and new:



And now the same screen with the new design applied:



You immediately notice that we moved away from the grey tones to a more blue-ish design. The tiles now feature a way larger title area with a focus on the actual commands. Tiles now have a gradient background.

There are a couple of things we already moved to the new layout: fonts and font sizes, primary and secondary buttons, tile context, section headers, progress bars and more.

The new UI still looks a bit off in large portions and that is because of what we haven't changed yet: if you take a closer look, all tables and form elements are still the same and use the old color scheme. Since forms and tables are a big contributor to each screen layout, we expect that the look and feel of the new UI will change quite a bit once that is implemented.

We already collected some early feedback from our supporters and took note of it. Right now it doesn't make sense to fine tune individual parts for the reasons just stated. Feel free to let us know what you think though, feedback is appreciated!

Nick

Last week I worked on getting a new trailer concept started. We haven't had a new trailer in a while, and I wanted to incorporate more of the actual gameplay into the next trailer and have it less stylized so players will know exactly what to expect when they start playing the game. It's still in an early concept phase and probably won't be finished for a while, but we are working on it. I also want the "story" of the trailer to be an actual scenario that can be done within the game that will help potential players understand what awaits them in Prosperous Universe.

Apart from that, I have a few more influencers that are being lined up for this month and next. Look out for those videos in the coming weeks!

As always: we'd love to hear what you think: join us on Discord or the forums!

Read the original article on the Prosperous Universe Website.

Happy trading!

Raise prestige and rise to prominence. Your chosen faction is depending on you to help build a solid network of reliability and influence. Complete crucial tasks that will determine the impact that your faction has across the universe, all while helping you gain valuable experience and increased profits. Its up to you to decide which contracts to complete and which to ignore. Be sure to choose wisely

CONTINGENT CONTRACTS

Everyone has an agenda. No matter if you are delivering supplies or running a political campaign for governor, your faction can lend a help hand. But nothing is free of course. While you carry out certain duties in order to help your faction rise to fame, you will additionally receive monetary funds, useful materials, and increase your standing with the faction.

FAMOUS OR INFAMOUS?

Reputation is everything. Build a repute for being reliable and business savvy and watch as your faction rewards skyrocket. If your reputation among your faction increases, you may find things a bit easier for yourself in the future

PENNY BIDS BEGONE

Tired of all the penny bid wars for expensive commodities? Thanks to the new pricing mechanism, you wont need to check your order book every second. Dynamic tick sizes will be introduced so more expensive items can no longer be underbid by one penny.

In honor of American Thanksgiving, we are giving players 10% off any PRO License purchase. You can redeem the code when accessing your Prosperous Universe user account.

Use code TRKY10

Happy Thanksgiving and see you in APEX!

Michi (molp)

Good news everyone! We are close to our next release, and it'll be called Prestige. You can find all the details in the Release Notes, but if you followed the devlogs over the course of the last weeks, you'll already know that the new main feature is going to be faction contracts. We haven't settled on a release day, but it'll be early December.

Speaking of faction contracts, I wrapped up the development last week and deployed it to the test server. If you are a supporter with test server access you can check it out over there. So far so good, we haven't experienced any major problems, so I moved on to a whole stack of smaller tasks that piled up since the last release.

For example: Up until now we weren't able to change a company's name or code when it contained a typo or a player bought a supporter pack that allowed for a one or two digit company code. The only option to change that has been a COLIQ. Last week, I finally added that functionality to our support tools.

I also increased the retention time for BASIC accounts. Back when we added the automatic deletion of inactive companies BASIC wasn't a thing yet. In the past we have had some complaints from BASIC players that were inactive for a while, who said that their companies were deleted rather quickly. The new inactivity duration is now 120 days before the deletion process will start.

There are still tasks like these left, so I will continue to work on them this week, while at the same time preparing everything for the release!

Fabian (Counterpoint)

Just today I added a couple more quality-of-life improvements to Prestige: Your ships will now display their maximum weight and volume capcities in the FLT command. Additionally, if a ship is not capable of FTL flight, its FTL fuel tank will be marked in red. This will make it easier to spot significant differences between your ships at a glance and should be especially helpful now that some players already have sets of 5 or more pretty diverse ships.

I mentioned the other tweaks and balancing changes in previous devlogs, but you'll also find all of them in the release notes linked above!

Nick

Make sure to check your email this week, there's a special Thanksgiving (even if you are not American, haha) treat for you!

I also worked on a lot of influencer marketing last week and we finally have a new video up online. I think the video turned out pretty well and we have been getting some new players from the ad since it posted. There will be another video in December and January that we have lined up from different influencers.

Now is the time to cast your final vote for planet QQ-001a to receive a formal name. You can vote here!

As always: we'd love to hear what you think: join us on Discord or the forums!

Read the original article on the Prosperous Universe Website.

Happy trading!

Michi (molp)

This week I was able to finish the exploration faction contract I talked about last week. While the contracts themselves did already work last week, lots of details have been added. Have a look at the video below. The player receives three contract offers from the faction:

[Please visit the Prosperous Universe website]

As you can see, all three are variations of the same type of exploration contract. In the preamble, we now briefly explain what faction contracts are about. We also list all faction offers that are received at the same time, and clicking on one them will open the respective contract view. The preamble also contains the mission description.

The payment for a faction contract can either consist of some currency only or a mixture of currency and materials. The materials rewarded are usually construction fabs, fuels or basic consumables.

In case of the exploration contract, we chose a random location a few jumps away from the players headquarters. It is up to the player to decide if the trip is worth their time and money. These types of contracts do have rather long deadlines, so they can be combined with other trips, for example deliveries or supply runs to the stations.

Now that we have established how the faction contract system works in general, I will continue implementing other types of faction contracts.

Nick

Last week was spent doing a variety of tasks like finding new influencers for a sponsored video, getting newsletters ready, and coordinating with SeaPear on the tutorial remakes. I'm really excited about getting these new tutorials out there since I think they have turned out very well and the community could definitely use the update. It has been awhile since the original videos were posted and there are many differences in game between now and then. You won't have to wait to much longer since we decided to release the "early game" videos sooner and then the "late game" videos will join the rest when they are finished. Make sure you are also tuning into Pear Talks PrUn Podcast!

As always: we'd love to hear what you think: join us on Discord or the forums!

Happy trading!

Full article on https://prosperousuniverse.com/blog/2022/10/17/contract-details-357/

Michi (molp)

I continued to work on improving the server performance this week. I already wrote a bit about it in last week's devlog. Besides the accounting system, we found other places where we can improve the memory consumption. To our astonishment, the behavior responsible for notifications came up in the memory analysis as well. Usually in-game notifications are removed after they have been marked read and seen for a while. It seems though, there are players who never mark the notifications as seen, and thus they stay around forever. In some cases we have found companies with 25k+ unseen notifications. The fix was simple: Even if notifications are not marked as seen and read, they will be removed after 45 days.

We also identified a potential problem in the behavior responsible for the commodity exchange trading. This behavior is used by both player run companies and by the automatic market makers. It seems that parts of the trading information, like order matches, are not deleted properly and stack up as well. We haven't gotten around to fixing this yet, but it is on the list.

All in all, we are pretty happy with the recent performance improvements. The general stability is very high, and we haven't seen an unscheduled restart in the last five days. Let's hope it stays like this for a while ;)

Besides the performance issues, I started working on faction contracts. Faction contracts are an addition to the recently added custom contracts, where faction agents send contract offers to players on a regular basis. These contracts are primarily intended for new players to increase their income, better utilize their starter ships, and get to know the game's mechanics. Faction contracts can be accepted by any license type. Older player will also receive faction contract offers from time to time. I just started with the implementation of the feature, and I intend to go into detail in the devlogs as the implementation progresses.

Nick

Last week I continued to do more toying around with the pricing pages and decided to work on the PRO license comparision table. Right now, the chart really makes the PRO license look amazing and free verision look very vanilla and bare bones. Previously we were trying to really push the PRO license on new players, but we know that players will always check out the game for free first and then decide if it's worth it to upgrade or not to PRO. I decided to completely redo this table with three categories: Free, Basic, and PRO and also stress that PRO is geared towards players that have already put a significant investment into the game and want more to do. The Free license column will be completley reworked to show off the best aspects of the game that is available for everyone. The table will become less of a comparision table and more of a tool to understand how each license works and who it is for. I think this will help drive home that idea that Prosperous Universe can be played at different speeds and is not pay-to-win.

As always: we'd love to hear what you think: join us on Discord or the forums!

Happy trading!

The Convergence is upon us. You have been given the opportunity to gradually upgrade your ships as you see fit, but make sure your ship is first parked in the shipyard. Custom Contracts will also allow those of you who like to deal in secret to flourish since you no longer need to post to the Local Market. And when those shady contracts start to go south, you now have the option to terminate a contract as long as the other party acquiesces to your request

SHIP ENHANCEMENTS

Not enough room for all your cargo? Ship moving a little too slow? Now is your chance to upgrade your ship incrementally without having to fulfill the entire blueprint. Once the ship is parked and unloaded in a shipyard, its time for the magic to begin.

PRIVATE PACTS

Some business deals are better kept in secret. With Custom Contracts you can give your pal some cash, request specific materials from a certain someone, or only deal directly with those of your choosing. Just make sure they pay you back with interest

CUTTING OFF THE CONTRACT

Perhaps the deal didnt go as planned, or someone couldnt exactly uphold their end of the bargain. Now you can send a contract termination request to end all aspects of the arrangement. Given that the other party agrees, the contract will become null and void.

Michi (molp)
There is a good chance you experienced the extended downtime we had earlier in the week. It kept me busy for quite a while, fixing all the issues and bugs that came with it. If you want to know more about it, I wrote a short post-mortem blog post detailing what happened here.

In more positive news, we are currently planning what will go into our next release. The original plan was to release another, smaller maintenance release fixing a few long-standing bugs and introducing small features and quality of life updates with it. We decided to do a feature release before that though, because I will be on paternal leave later this summer. The release will entail the ship upgrade feature Fabian mentioned in his last devlogs and the first iteration of the custom contracts features.

We will deploy the ship upgrades feature on the test server later this week and let you know on Discord once it is live. In order for players with test server access to actually be able to test it, we will remove the update costs that occur going from one blueprint to another.

Fabian (Counterpoint)
After finishing up the ship upgrades, I looked into a couple smaller tweaks for the upcoming release. I'll just let the video below do the talking for one of the more relevant ones.

(To see video visit https://prosperousuniverse.com/blog/2022/07/18/release-imminent-344/)

Nick
Last week was fairly normal for me as I continue to seek out different channels that would like to collaborate with us and also for new influencers/streamers. One of the more interesting topics I worked on was the tutorial remakes project. I was able to reach out to someone that is already making content for us and asked if they would like to work with us in an official capacity. We had a conversation that went really well, and I am pretty confident that the remakes will turn out well and help new players engage with the game after so many changes have taken place since the original tutorials were made.

As always: we'd love to hear what you think: join us on Discord or the forums!

Happy trading!

Check out the patch notes on what has been updated in the game below:

This is not only a re-write, but also a re-design with a focus on new players' perspective. Similar to an RPG where you select your class first, players see the Company Profile (Victualler, Fuel Engineer, ..) first. A new player, who doesn't know anything about the game, can choose what sounds the best and what they like the most.

Next comes the Faction Selection. Next to the faction selection controls, we'll show the universe map with the factions highlighted, so the players get a sense of where everything is.

The starting location screen then allows the user to select from a list of starting locations filtered by the faction. It shows basic information about the selected planet, like population, resources, just like before. The starting location will be highlighted on the map.

In the last step, the players can then choose a company name and code. We have changed how the forms behave, and once there is some valid input (minimum length requirement fulfilled) it checks on each keystroke if a given name or code is actually available. This will solve the problem of players getting stuck when entering names that already exist.

This week is all about custom private contracts, which just jumped forward on the feature list.

Fabian (Counterpoint)

One of the results of our recent team meeting was that we bumped the topic of custom private contracts up on our priority list, which means we need all the details figured out. It's an often requested feature that also works really well for the changes to politics and infrastructure we're planning (and also the faction-contract aka "quest" system which, as the name suggests, will likely be contract-based itself).

What I currently have in mind is that you create your own contracts from a set of "building blocks". So for example, you could add a payment condition, then a delivery, and then another payment. Or you could have a delivery, a provisioning and a pickup without any payment at all (essentially a "barter trade"). Each condition could depend on a previous one or not, and each one might have its own deadline. When you're happy with your "draft", you'll then be able to send it to a potential partner, which puts the contract into a new "offer" state that can be accepted, rejected or edited on the receivers side with their own suggestions and sent back.

In line with the game's sandbox-driven philosophy, this system opens up lots of gameplay possibilities but naturally also raises quite a few questions, starting with what accounting value to assign to items when they weren't really "paid for" in the traditional sense. Additionally, we want to allow you to create repeating contracts or, in case you agree with your partner, cancel already closed contracts, which need to be handled cleanly as well.

By the way, in case you have any thoughts on the topic yourself, we're currently collecting feedback in a forum thread!

Nick

In conjunction with the Steam release, I also planned for a big influencer video to come out the week after, which was last week. If you are interested, we just got a massive influx from Real Civil Engineer's video. This really helped with getting even more players where they now have the option of playing either on Steam or on their browser. Aside from that, I also worked on the Steam store page and monitoring reviews that keep trickling in. A huge shoutout to all those that are helping coach new players on either Discord or the in-game chat. You guys rock!

Michi (molp)

This week has been all about technical maintenance, again! Due to the Steam release and an integrated video ad of a youtuber, we saw a large amount of new registrations. A dying, single node has been no problem so far, as it is just rebooted and is reunited with the rest again after a few minutes. This time we saw cascading failures: The load left behind by a dying node would be moved over the remaining nodes, pushing them over the edge as well. Unfortunately PrUn wasn't able to recover from these failures in an automatic fashion. Even worse: the error messages we received were misleading and we spent quite a bit of time looking in the wrong direction.

After a while of tweaking the game is running stable again now, but there is still some research left to do, which I will do this week.

As always: we'd love to hear what you think: join us on Discord or the forums!

Happy trading!

We are thrilled to announce that Prosperous Universe has officially launched on Steam today, April 20, 2022. Welcome to APEX!

WHAT IS PROSPEROUS UNIVERSE?

Prosperous Universe is a space economy MMO built around a strong online community where players venture out into the universe and carve their own path.

Make meaningful choices that directly impact the overall economy and contribute to the success or demise of your company. Be the first to discover a new optimization strategy or form a coalition with other players. And with no PvP, the possibilities are endless.

Climb the political ladder as you trade, negotiate, manipulate, or bribe your way to the top. Each planet is home to several factions, and its up to you to decide who to trust and who to betray.

We are thrilled to announce that Prosperous Universe will officially launch on Steam on April 20, 2022. Make sure you mark your calendars and add the game to your Wishlist!

WHAT IS PROSPEROUS UNIVERSE?

Prosperous Universe is a space economy MMO built around a strong online community where players venture out into the universe and carve their own path.

Make meaningful choices that directly impact the overall economy and contribute to the success or demise of your company. Be the first to discover a new optimization strategy or form a coalition with other players. And with no PvP, the possibilities are endless.

Climb the political ladder as you trade, negotiate, manipulate, or bribe your way to the top. Each planet is home to several factions, and its up to you to decide who to trust and who to betray.