Devlog #5

Balancing out mid/late game gameplay elements.

I needed to come up with a way to make side hustling activities less dominating. The resource trading especially was problematic, since with the prices moving around a lot it was pretty easy to make lots of credits in a short time. Without any constraints, the best strategy would be to completely skip upgrading the ship and just sit at the station and trade, and then buy everything at once after snowballing enough funds.

After some experimentation, I ended up with two changes:

• added a monthly quota for buy-orders based on game progress (due to "processing constraints" obviously)

• added another progress meter (besides credits earned) called Grinder's License level which increases only from the minerals returned after mining and tied some of the progression, like the buy order quota, into that

Now, resource trading remains a great way to earn funds but you will have to balance it out with other gameplay elements.

Some of the other recent additions include:

• "nuke" program for quickly demolishing roid fields

• "feed" program for reading about events like resource price movements

• portable trading program to make it possible to quickly benefit from said movements, even from whatever desolate locale we happen to be grinding roids in

I'm now pretty close to the point of being able to complete one full run. The run length will be tied to the in-game calendar so that a single run spans about three years, and then the wealth earned will be the final score for the run.

J