If you aren’t all that interested in the usual “what I did” part, please feel free to skip ahead to the end of this post for the “request for games” bit.
I started the week full of motivation by preparing all the work items required to wrap up the “website overhaul”. As you’ve surely noticed, the account management part of our website got a visual refresh for the Steam release. The plan was that we would to the same for the remainder of the website further down the road. Most of this work is done by an external freelancer, so I had to specify what needed to be done. This isn’t all about design, though. Account management and website are currently two separate projects, with the latter being a very much outdated, overly complex mix of technologies for something that’s essentially a few static pages and a blog. So I want to integrate this into the account management project (which happens to be one and the same project that also generates the Prosperous Universe website and account management pages).
After I got the prep work done, two things happened:
- I got started on some technical work of migrating the old blog content to the new project. Our freelancer is mostly concerned with frontend development/design, so I wanted to get this out of the way for her.
- The other one of my children got sick (for refrence).
Item no 1 took far longer than I anticipated (story of my life!) and item no 2 meant that I had to get this additional work done during nap times and in the evenings. Yay
Anyway, I got all of this wrapped up by the end of the week, so during an additional shift on Saturday I was able to also complete the first bits of my preparatory work for the DS integration, namely getting the integration testing framework back into a working state. Next up will be the test harness for the ORS so I can start implementing new DS functionality in parallel to the old way of how things work.
Request for Games
Last but not least, I could use your help: While I do want to work on cool new features like all of the DS stuff and the many things on the roadmap, with the Steam release we have also set ourselves the goal of refreshing AirlineSim’s UI/UX. Not just in the sense of mere looks, but also in terms of a better onboarding experience, an in-game tutorial and that sort of stuff. My colleague @molp and I want to sit down sometime over the next few weeks to do some initial brainstorming in this regard. And to prepare for that, I would like to spend some time looking at how other games in AirlineSim’s genre approach this. And this is where you come in:
Which games do you know/love/hate/play that are somewhat similar to AS and why?
It doesn’t have to be browser-based or even multiplayer. It should just be similar in the way it works: Very few graphics (so no city builders or “map-heavy games” like Factorio) and loads of numbers, tables, charts etc. There may be graphical elements of course…they just aren’t the primary means of interaction.
Please let me know on this thread!