Back from vacation, I dove right back into a week packed with stuff 
Monday we relaunched Otto, employing our more automated approach for the first time in practice. Which, ironically, meant that everything took a tad longer than usual 
Overestimating complexity
Following that I did some clean-up and refactoring work left from before my vacation to bridge the gap until @molp arrived for a 2-day design meeting at simulogics HQ. The goal of this meeting was to discuss possible ways of how to improve the visual appeal of AirlineSim (UI) and how to make it easier and more intuitive to use and get started (UX) - both in a technological and practical sense. This is one of the high-level goals of our Steam Early Access release and the other major development project next to DS integration (more on that below).
You might remember that I asked you a while back about games similar to AS that you play and that you think do a good (or bad) job in terms of presenting their inherent complexity. One game that was mentioned was Football Manager. Interestingly, we had this game on the radar for years. When @Counterpoint drew up the first briefs for the agency that helped us with the ASTD prototype, Football Manager already showed up as an example. But with me having absolutely zero (none, nada) interest in football, I never actually bothered to try it.
So when Michi got here and we started working this subject, we decided to at least watch some Letās Plays and - after those looked promising - downloaded the demo and gave it an actual try. And boy did we have an epiphany!
This game is crazy complex! The amount of detail one can and has to deal with is mind-boggling. There are so many things the player can influence that thereās a whole feature around delegating some of those tasks and decisions to your staff (who you have to manage, of course). We looked at how this wealth of information is structured and presented, how a new player is introduced to the game and how their help/tutorial system works, which provided a lot of inspiration for our own plans.
But the biggest take-away really was that, despite me always being worried about it, AirlineSimās complexity isnāt that extreme and there are other, very successful games out there that exceed it. One caveat of course is that in Football Manager, you manage a complex but more or less constant-sized organisation, where in AirlineSim, a company can grow to operate thousands of aircraft and and tens of thousands of flights. So the level of detail featured by FM wouldnāt scale in AS. But thereās room for more.
Either way, this was a great exercise and a strong reminder to look beyond the own genre every once in a while
More flight planning changes and first visible bits of the DS
The remainder of the week I spent tackling a few more items from my āflight planning improvementsā list as well as a few other minor changes/bugfixes. All of that will likely be part of a maintenance patch today or tomorrow.
I also spent a bit more time on DS integration. While a lot of that was theoretical and mostly exists on the whiteboard in my office now, I actually added a tiny visible bit to the game itself (will also arrive in the patch mentioned above):
The airport info page now lists which IATA area and sub-area an airport falls into. This has no effect at the moment, but will soon be required to determine the so-called plating carrier of a connection according to, you guessed it, IATA rules. More on that to follow soon, I guess