Greetings, Magnates! It's a new year and a great opportunity to start involving you more in what's happening with the game. I do tweet game stuff almost daily, but of course not everyone uses twitter. So let's see if we can make this a recurring thing. I'll try to keep it short and to the point. I took two weeks off in december to work full time on the game. It was a great experience and I got a lot of work done. Now, as the game is still in what I consider semi-early development, there aren't a lot of really focused updates where I work on just one thing. Working on one area/aspect/feature of the game often leads to more work in other areas of the game, and then those things often needs further refinement, so it's a lot of back and forth all over the place. But here are the main highlights from the past month of development:

UI style

The game has seen probably 4 or 5 iterations of the UI by now and I finally (hopefully!) believe that I've settled on a style that works well and looks good. However, there's still a chance it may change again as I start implementing the rest of the features that are UI-heavy. Time will tell!

Contracts

Contracts will be the main driving force of the game. Companies in the solar system will put out contracts for certain products. When you accept a contract you commit to deliver the amount of products stated in the contract within the stated timeline. Some contracts offer an upfront payment, but otherwise you won't get paid until the contract has been completed in full, so you have to plan ahead. The first couple of contracts are deliberately easy to fulfill but soon enough you'll find that you need to diversify and redesign your factories to keep up with demands. In the beginning you'll be locked out of a lot of contracts because you must have a factory site on the same planet as the company offering the contract. This encourages you to establish new sites on other planets, thus having to manage multiple factories simultaneously, which is a key element of the game.

Relations

Relations and contracts are closely related; you gain relation points by completing contracts. A better relation with a company leads to better rating on that particular planet. The rating is an indicator of your dominance on the planet, and once you're dominating all the planets in the solar system, you win the game! The relations system is still in its infancy so there's plenty to come.

Map visuals

As an experiment I made the default map less earth-like (removing grass and water) and more barren planet-like (making everything more dark and brown) by applying a texture to the surface. It turned out to be a massive improvement. There are now 4 map themes (all moddable); default, ice sheet, desert and rocky. And that's it for this first proper devlog. If you're interested in more, you can follow me on twitter: @risingtail - oh, and don't forget to wishlist, if you haven't already. It's incredibly important for a small indie dev like me. Until next time, Fey at Rising Tail https://store.steampowered.com/app/1475310/Factory_Magnate/