Not sure whether this translates to English, but in German, there’s this idea of a “post-vacation bow wave”…the stuff that piles up while you are on vacation and then tends to double your workload once you’re back in the office 
Fortunately, said bow wave was manageable. It took about a day and a half to clear my inbox and work through help desk tickets, and maybe another day or so to tackle a couple of smaller development tasks, but I’ve seen worse 
Since I focussed on smaller, self-container tasks before my vacation, my main task for week 35 was to get the next larger project on track. Candidates in this category are these:
- The visual parts of the UI redesign - I am currently working with an external designer to get a high level concept of how we could make the game’s visual language more appealing while also staying true to its legacy. Since this is work on progress without a clear timeline, I am pushing back anything that relies too heavily on visuals.
- Groundwork for better Location-based Demand, better ground networks and Proper Historic Game Worlds - this is one of those projects that incurs ever higher costs the longer it isn’t tackled. While the development complexity is nothing be underestimated, the true effort is in a.) designing the data structure and b.) researching the actual data. The later the new data structure is in place, the longer we need to research data in an old format, causing information loss and doubled effort. But…it’s one of those projects that would take quite some time to implement, but there will only be tangible benefits for players once everything’s finished .
- Continued work on return traffic distribution - as outlined in the devlog for week 30, there are several ideas for how to make return traffic distribution better, but all of them either are other features already on the roadmap or they depend on such. So as much as this feels urgent because it’s already live in Paine, other things have higher priority. See the linked devlog for much more detail on this.
- The new DS search interface: This is more or less set as one of the next projects. It sort of hinges on UI design and has a structural dependency on Fares (see below), but I figure I’ll try to get started on this as soon as possible, especially because it shouldn’t be a huge project either.
- Fares - the biggest upcoming extension to the Distribution System. In its final form, this will require a bunch of UI as well, so as said above, I’ll try to keep these bits at a minimum for now. But at least under the hood, work can and should start asap. Especially because the new DS search interface should of course render results in a format that already takes Fares into account.
I was very tempted to get started on 2, but opted to prioritize tangible changes for now. And while I won’t get started on the full implementation of Fares just yet, I sat down to write up the technical requirements for the first two development phases. Just so I know what needs to be done before I can implement the new search UI, even if there are no actual player-managed Fares in the game yet.
After that, I spent more or less all of Friday on a call with Michi to refine and expand our (influencer) marketing plans. Regular readers of the devlog will know that we’ve been testing a tool for quite some time now that supports us in finding and contacting relevant influencers. But despite this tool, the process remains labor-intensive for a small studio like ours without any dedicated marketing staff. Consequently, we need to streamline the process and automate as much as possible. In the age of AI, the latter bit might end up a bit easier to do than a few years ago. But still…as much as I want to, I am not and likely never will be able to spend all of my working week just on game development 