Here is the outline of what I will present to you today:
-Recent Developments
-Development Schedule
-Playerbase growth
-How you can help
-Epilogue
Recent Developments
This has been a fairly busy month in terms of gameplay development. The key reason for this is our increased workload during the last 2 months. Here I will present you the key developments:
a)Community Organization
This is not a gameplay development but it is the most important thing we have worked on since the last period. The game currently needs its community more than ever and managing to organize it in ways that are helpful for the game, is very important. We currently have a moderator team for our Facebook page and also a Player Dev Team. We will look to further improve all aspects of the game that need community help.
Applications for the player dev team are still possible, just PM me.
b)Plantations Improvements
There have been some improvements and fixes for plantations. Mostly for the bids of Quartermaster. We had some reports of Quartermaster acting weirdly. If you notice anything similar, please open a topic in Bugs thread and provide as much information as you can.The info we want actually, are the expiring bids list at least 2 hours before expiration and all the lists after they expire.
c)UI improvements
Several UI improvements have been implemented. More will follow. Additionally, we have worked in the background designing the next steps. So, you may see some changes but the overall work done is more than what you currently get to see.
d)Ships Log
In terms of game impact, this is the feature of the month. It is an old idea that we felt that the right time to get implemented was right before ship traits. It ended up good enough, especially for a version 1.0 feature.
e)Administration contact at Instant Messenger
You might have noticed that at your IM list, administrator now appears. This is the in-game administrator account, operated by me. We chose to open this up, to allow for quick communication when situation demands it. Should you need anything pg-related, feel free to contact me there.
f)We also had the Chrome Extension, beta version.
Add it here: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/deta ... bgbb?hl=en
Remember to rate it!
We also have a discussion topic (with no replies yet) where you can request features for it:
viewtopic.php?f=5&t=4750
Development Schedule
1)User Interface
The user interface is going to be one of the two main aspects of the game we will continue to work. This is expected to continue heavily, by improving the interface page by page, gradually. At one point, there will be a change in the main interface.
2)PvP/PvE
The first step in new PvP era, are ship traits. There are expected soon. We have been working a lot on them lately and not many things remain. We are close to release.
More features will follow. There are already many discussions regarding these steps in Game Discussion and your feedback there could help the features design immensely. More discussions will be opened after traits implementation.
3)Newcomer Advisors - Game Paths
There is also one more aspect which we want to develop in parallel with the other two. We still need some paths there. Although, we already have like 2-3 and we could potentially work on them.
Playerbase Growth
Last 30 Days: 420
Here is an overview on account metrics:
Accounts Status
Total Accounts 119,390
Total Characters 16,451
Without Character 102,939
Characters flagged Active 3,779
Characters flagged inactive 12,672
The numbers are not looking good. We are currently advertising and we will need to increase our budget for advertising in the following months. However, we will need more than this.
How can you help
Like I said above, community help is very important. Two tasks for this month for all of you and an extra one for those that want to help us more.
1)
For this month, there is something that all of you can do. Please add PG chrome extension and give a good review and 5 stars. This can help us get new players. Even if you do not want it, you can still add it and then de-activate it.
2)
We have daily posts of our FB page. These are posted by our FB team. If you use Facebook, please try to like these posts. Even commenting them. This will help us get more new players.
3)
For those those who want to help extra, I am open for discussion in what we need to do to help more people discover the game. We have created a #promotepg channel in Slack for such usage. We will look probably to also pick a few people who will manage this aspect of the game. This team will be like FB mod team and will be rewarded with credits.
No final decision has been taken yet on this but if you can help in some way either because you have a good idea or because you have a way, let me know.
Epilogue
This signals the end of this monthly report.
For any questions or feedback, please post!
Till next time then!
