Campaign missions are pretty much quests. (Why not call them quests, then? Because spaaaaaaaace. There are no quests in space. Please do not point me towards Space Quest.)

What I’d like to do first is talk about the first mission that I implemented to figure out how all the different pieces needed to come together.

Mission: Procurement Contract
It made sense to start with something simple, so simple it is. The mission goal can be summed up easily: “acquire a quantity of commodity X and deliver it to market Y for a reward”. Of course, once you dive into the details, it gets a bit more involved. How do you take on a mission? How do you keep track of it? How do you complete it?

None of these are difficult questions, and lots of games have quests, so they’ve all been answered more times than one could count. Mostly, it “just” boils down to UI work. “Just” in quotes because, oh boy, there’s a lot of it, and there’s lots of new underlying data to make it all work, too.

So, then – taking on missions. A mission board will do nicely:

One thing to note here is that the board shows missions from nearby star systems as well. It’s also not the only way to get missions – well, it is *right now*, but there’s nothing preventing missions from being taken on in conversation with an NPC, for example.
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