Part of the design process, it seems, is going back and changing things that seemed like they would work well on paper, but didn’t quite pan out in practice. Putting several systems together can be an especially challenging process, and the one you start with will likely need the most changing as the other pieces settle in around it.

For this release, I started by revamping the economy system. Largely, the redesign has met its goals – it has good performance, and it can represent a flexible set of events in terms of “what’s happening in the game world”. However, working on the UI for colony management has exposed a few areas for improvement. (Pictured below: not one of them.)

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In the last couple of months, I’ve been busy fleshing out the outpost/colony management screen shown in the previous blog post. Well, by “fleshing out” I mean “making all the buttons actually do something”, which in a few cases involves adding an entirely new set of mechanics into the game. The new mechanic I’d like to talk about here is “population growth”, that is, how a market grows in in size over time. (Brief aside: I’ll be using “colony”, “market”, and “outpost” interchangeably for the rest of the post. Yes, I really do need to straighten out the terminology at some point.)

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