Plantations Expansion

[Captain Jack]

For the.. daily update..

We are still working on Acres Rental and this system is the main reason of the delay so far. It's like building a new market from scratch. There was unfortunately no other way to support acres rental, as explained above. Hopefully, this new.. beast will be done soon. We have been working non-stop on it and we will keep working non-stop till plantations are out.

[Jessy's Dream]

Credits Exchange feature was less work than the Acres Rental system.

[sXs]

Credits Exchange feature was less work than the Acres Rental system.

From my basic understanding of coding, the bidding process itself should be pretty basic, the complication come from the allocation and disbursement of acres? Also the interface process i could see being complicated.

I do not envy the workload Jessy.

[Captain Jack]

The biggest failure is that we never recognized acres rental as a part of the feature that could be exploited. Then, through the discussion here, about 8 days ago, we realized that the system we had in place was a failure. So, we needed to redesign it. You followed some of the process here. Redisigning something and building it from scratch, is always taking a lot of time. Individual parts, no matter how complicated they are, once you know what you need, are not taking much time to code. The bidding part here however, is unique versus anything else in the game. So once again, we had to build a bidding system from scratch. On the 29th, we started working on it. I thought it would end in 1 day, Jessica was mocking me about it but said she will try. Coding started at 29th but final functionality was locked at 31th. Coding is still open, we have not finished coding Acres Rental. So, this is the 6th day in a row for something that must have taken 1 to finish. Since yesterday, things are looking better and today I hope we will finish it. Still, if you single out this feature, the time it took us so far, is judged as fast. Although it is not enough due to plantations schedule.

Then we got workers priorities, where we decided to use a better interface than the initial one which is very annoying. We will then use the same interface for Acres distribution. We will have then to ensure that both acres rental and workers priorities work as intended. Then we can release.

I hope that you all can forgive our failure to meet the deadline. It's very disappointing for us. If there is any consolation, then this is that you are going to take something better and more finished than you were going to take.

We also decided to be more realistic with the events. Our plan now is to launch this as a beta version. This will keep the game version at 1.9 and no announcements/promotions will take place. The feature will fully run but we will use the beta period to save for the testing we were not able to do. Anyone participating, should be aware that there might be issues. While Beta runs, we will fix any issues found and in the same time we will code the events system. Once the event system is completed, we will move Plantations to full release. Announcements will be made and game promotion will start in order to bring some veterans back.

Then we will start working on the Flagship AND a lot of more things. We will try to make up for the delay here by working extra on the rest. Once we reach a point where you will start to feel dizzy with all the new things popping up, only then we will pause the new features development. We will still have a lot of things to do anyway, that are now put behind.

[sXs]

CJ, Do you have any idea how long the Beta period will be?

If you are planning on the full plantation upgrade in the beta then it would need to be long enough to allow for all things in the beta to be maxed out.

[Captain Jack]

Not that long, beta should last as long as we are building the events system. I would hope this will take less than a week but I cannot be sure. Certainly, we need to have Flagship basics out (perhaps Special Crew//First mate too) and prepare the ground for what is next, (possibly Port Buildings) before the end of June.

[sXs]

Not that long, beta should last as long as we are building the events system. I would hope this will take less than a week but I cannot be sure. Certainly, we need to have Flagship basics out (perhaps Special Crew//First mate too) and prepare the ground for what is next, (possibly Port Buildings) before the end of June.

I will volunteer.

[Captain Jack]

At the initial schedule, we had about a full week of extensive testing. This would ensure that the end release would be free of most bugs.

Right now, we cannot afford this time. We will still test for major issues. But we believe that there will be more issues to be found. With your help, we will find it easier and FASTER. This is why we will choose the beta road. It will be open for all though; you will just use it knowing that it will have less testing hours on it, than anything else we released before. In short, it will be an open beta, not a closed beta.

[Jessy's Dream]

Plantations development is ongoing.

We have finished most major functionalities.
We have rewritten interfaces where needed.

We still need to balance all numbers which is a very tiresome procedure as it drains you out.
We have also added a feedback system that was not in the initial design. The plantation will now display text messages to help you out in the management. On this system, we will put the events system we will add right after the release. These messages will be multiple different per day and per plantation and will also provide insight on what is currently going in your plantation.

This particular insight system was scheduled for a later version but we thought it would be too difficult and less immersive to launch the feature without it. This means that we will delay a few days more, I cannot estimate how many though as there is still code to be written. You will be getting a far better feature though in the expense of some days of delay at your end.

[Bomont]