Greetings, Magnates! Since devlog #3 I've been spending most of my time thinking, brainstorming, defining and refining various game design aspects for Factory Magnate. While that is a good thing it also means there's not a whole lot to show off this time. Instead I'll talk a bit about the ideas I've been working on. I should emphasize that none of these are being actively implemented yet, they are just ideas. Some will make it, some will not. But this is your chance to have a say if you want to see some of these ideas developed; comment on this post or hit me up any time on twitter.

Currently exploring these ideas

• Distribute energy through under ground conduits. As of now there is no distribution at all. All units will work as long as there is enough energy on site.
• Have companies pick up their cargo themselves.
• Related to above, some sort of transit station and storage with cargo ready for pickup.
• New units for pulverizing, painting, alloying, packaging.
• Factions. This could be a big one. Allow the player to pick a faction. Factions will have some perks and disadvantages. Much like civs in Civ.
• Company classes that define various properties like what products the company will trade and definitely not trade, trade terms like wanting to pay more for certain products, how fast they grow etc.
• Planet upgrades, adding an entire strategic layer to the game. Allow the player to upgrade planet stats like infrastructure, industry, consumerism and others. They would be paid for by influence points and money and in return offer some perks but also a path to victory. Having one or more fully upgraded planets could be a win condition.
• Related to above: change the current "relation" system to influence. Influence would be earned by gaining a foothold in the local planet economy. The more business you conduct, the more influence.
• Revised contract system. As of now, contracts are for a fixed quantity of products to be delivered within a certain time frame. I'm seriously considering changing it to long term commitments where you enter a contract promising to keep delivering products to the company for some time. You'll be paid according to market price of that product, which will go up and down depending on the quantities of that product in circulation. (A basic demand and supply simulation)

Full change list

• Added a LOT of decorational tiles
• Added ability to rotate deco tiles
• Added mouse scroll support to unit UI windows
• Added property to units: light_emitter - will enable modders to specify radius, color/tint and blink behaviour
• Added property to units: shadow - will enable modders to specify whether the unit casts a shadow or not
• Drag-building tiles will now only show a ghost image on top of valid map tiles (used to be all tiles)
• Cleaned up some of the JSON used for items and units
• Did some QA to be quite certain some parts of the game won't capture input events when they don't need to, fixing some bugs in the process
• Generally speaking, the code base is pretty clean now and ready to be messed up again