Dev Blog- Sea Trading Game- Continuing conditions, reaction to similar game

This has been an interesting week. I was able to fix a number of annoying bugs, although I still have a few more to squash in the process. But more than that, I was able to get the game to actually work, including a "You Win!" alert that can appear! Note that the final version will have a sandbox mode, but it will also have some missions, if nothing else than for the tutorial.

The main thing I did this week was to improve the dialog displaying the victory conditions. I'm still trying to decide exactly what I want it to do, but I can greatly improve it once I have the decision made on exactly what I want to do with this dialog. It is coming along, slowly, however.

One of the big things I did this week was to look in to a similar game that has just been released, Winds of Trade. I've known about this game for about 8 months, which was about 6 months after I started my own project. Those early looks, well, I wasn't discouraged too much. When I first looked at the released version, however, I became a bit discouraged, I will admit. In a lot of ways, it is the game that I set out to make when I first started. But the more I've looked in to it, the more I realize that while it is certainly in the same space, and has a lot of the same features, there are quite a few differences, and I think those differences will make a huge difference in the feel of the game overall. In the end, I've decided to study the game, learn from it, possibly including a few similar UI/UX type features, but in the end, my game will be different than it will be. One thing that I have been convinced of as a result, however, is to defer my game a bit until I've made it better, and that when released, it should be of a similar quality level, if not higher, than Winds of Trade.

This next week I'm continuing the conditions, and tutorial fixes. I'm going to also start working on squashing some bugs that have been on my plate for a while.

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