Sea Trading Game- Modeling Supply, and a path forward!

This week as in recent weeks has been a week of figuring out some core gaming stuff that doesn't easily translate in to progress, but is really essential to getting the game to work correctly.

The main focus of the week was on creating supplies. Like the demand before it, I set up a series of modifiers that can be added to a good that determine exactly how a supply is managed. The most interesting of these was to require "tools" and "seeds".

A tool is an item that is required that isn't consumed to make a new product. For instance, an ax will make wood production easier than it would be without one.

A "seed" is something that is required to make something else. For instance, you have to plant a bit of food to grow new food. A seed could even be making a resource out of another, using iron to make an ax, for instance.

Of course, most of this modeling will be semi-transparent to the user, but what will be seen is that you will be able to change the world through your trading. There might be a continent that has never seen potatoes, for instance. You bring a load of potatoes, and someone plants them. Then all of the sudden that new continent has potatoes growing there.

Another similar thing to "seeds" is "skills". A skill is required to make something. These skills will be propagated by moving people around. If a continent has never seen black smithing, and a black smith is brought there, then that new skill will begin to be used, and spread throughout the continent slowly.

The effect of all of this will be that you, as a lowly trader, can change the world in profound ways. I'm starting to see this as a real possibility, and excited to see how it all comes together!

The last thing of importance that I did was to get my upcoming path figured out much more smoothly than I have been recently. For the last 3 weeks, my task was "Figure out Supply/Demand". That's it... Now I've broken down what's left into more manageable chunks, which always helps my productivity.

Top of the list is to add a bit more logic to supply management, and then start figuring out how the pricing structure will work from supply/demand. I'm not quite sure how this will work out in the end, but this is a really crucial step to the game, and when it's done, I really think it will feel like a smoother game overall! I expect to have most of this accomplished by mid-August, and from there to start adding more goods and working on balancing the game.