It feels a bit surreal, but after adding one more rating component - airline image - the core parts of the Individual Travel Requests feature are done. By that I mean that technically, nothing is keeping me from rolling this out.
In practice, that’s a whole different story, of course 
As stated last week, crucial parts of this feature were already done before I even got started, because I copied them over from the ASTD last year and adjusted them for use in legacy-AS. So to finish this, I was merely filling in the gaps.
But besides a bit of (optional) tool support that’s still missing, the real challenge is “game feel” here: We now have a bunch of rating components and a handful of broad-stroke passenger types. I need to add more of the latter and then somehow tweak and balance the former in a way that we get the desired effects without causing unintended ones (like some parts of the market simply being inaccessible or another making the game too easy).
I don’t really have a concrete plan for this process yet. I just know that I won’t be able to do it without a.) actual game data and b.) loads of feedback from actual players. And that leads me straight to my next project: Setting up a new game world similar to our internal test game world, but with all feature flags of all in-development features enabled that players can run actual airlines in.
There’s more to it than “just” setting up a game world, tough. I want to use this opportunity to get the very first (technical) pieces of the UI refresh puzzle laid out. But more on that soon…I didn’t get beyond rough planning last week as private matters and viruses slowed me down a bit.