Dev Blog- Colonial Sea Trader- Yes, it has a name finally! Also, UX improvements

Well, I've been talking about it for ages, and it's finally happened. This is no longer the unnamed Sea Trading Game, it has a real name! And that name is Colonial Sea Trader.

Still working on the artwork, of course, but there it is!

And there's more! I've been working on improving the UI considerably. I've reduced the amount of things on the screen, showing just the important stuff. I've also done the start of an effort to improve all of the dialogs. See the start of it below. Note that there will be tweaks, but it should be something like what you see below.

Other improvements include the start of keyboard shortcuts, which can be expanded easily further,
improvements to the map edges, studying some of the edge cases to improve the display, and starting to do work to improve some of the artwork.

This week I'm planning on continuing the UI updates I did last week, and in general will be working on the polish of the game. I might also improve the tutorial, world creation, and other such things, I haven't decided yet.

If you haven't yet, feel free to like me on Facebook, join my Google Group, subscribe to my Sub Reddit, or follow me on Twitter, where you are likely to get frequent updates!  

Dev Blog- Sea Trading Game. Let's give it a name, and fix UI stuff.

Well, I've decided to finally give my game a name. Right now I've been floating two titles, "Colonial Sea Trader" and "Columbian Exchange". Perhaps not the most original names, but, hey, it's better than "Unnamed Sea Trading Game" that I've been floating for over a year. I'm quite interested to hear what you have to think of, let me know.

In conjunction with the naming decision, I also released a new video. This will probably be the last one from this channel, I'm going to work on a dedicated channel soon for this game, but I'd like to get it named first.

A few other things that I did:

• I upgraded to Unity 5.6.
• I improved the way the layout changes with resolution, I think it should be more consistent now. I'm going to be improving a few other of the displays as well, but overall...
• I've now made it so the entire screen is visible, and not the the small portion visible before.
• I fixed a number of bugs.
• I have a new camera system in place that I think will take me to the final system. Lines are no longer visible, although I need to improve the cloud system a bit to get it perfected.

My goals for this week are as follows:

• Improve the image display slightly.
• Make my final name decision!
• Numerous bug fixes to make the game feel more like a game.

If you haven't yet, feel free to like me on Facebook, join my Google Group, subscribe to my Sub Reddit, or follow me on Twitter, where you are likely to get frequent updates!  

Dev Blog- Sea Trading Game- Making rectangular worlds, larger worlds

For most of my development process, I've been making square worlds. I've long wanted to play with rectangular images, but I haven't had it happen yet. This week, I worked on making that change, as well as improving the overall speed! Finally, I improved the rendering of the worlds to look better for large worlds.

There are still a few things that I'm adjusting, namely the behavior of the minimap, some of the world layout, etc. I also temporarily reduced the number of cities displayed, to make the rendering quicker.

This week I'm going to fix a few of the issues I'm still seeing with world rendering, and work on speeding it up as well. I'm then going to work on some balance, and if all goes well I'll work on re-making the main UI, although I'm not particularly confident that I'll make it that far.

If you haven't yet, feel free to like me on Facebook, join my Google Group, subscribe to my Sub Reddit, or follow me on Twitter, where you are likely to get frequent updates! 

Dev Blog- Sea Trading Game- Adding map labels, steeper camera angle

I've continued the trend of updating the UI, some slight performance tweaks, and other related things. The dialogs are still in need of a pretty massive overhaul, as in the main UI, but I'll be working on those at a later date. For now, check out the latest improvements!

The next UI I'm going to work on is reducing, if not removing, the side panel information bar. I'm just really not happy with it, but I haven't figured out how to improve it quite yet.

Another likely update is the buying/ selling process, which I've never quite been happy with.

More likely improvements for the next week will be focused on gameplay fixes. I'm still working out exactly what those might be, but I am quite convinced that

Lastly, I will work on non-square play fields. I've long been using square fields, but I feel it would be more realistic to have something rectangular, and I'm going to work on implementing that.

If you haven't yet, feel free to like me on Facebook, join my Google Group, subscribe to my Sub Reddit, or follow me on Twitter, where you are likely to get frequent updates!