Week 2: Blog 2 (Detailed Analysis of Economies in MMOs)

Blog 2:

A bit of a hectic timeflow, but decent progress was made. Most of the game is (theoretically) ready to be coded in, but coding in the actual game might prove to be a struggle, considering how much the little content I have planned is already amassing to.

Quick overview:

• Monday. Had meetings with both IA and EA. Got a more refined and definitely more feasible outlook on the final vision of the game. The main things that were changed were both the format of the game and the timeframe of the game.
  The game went from an endless, potentially-infinite-time sink to a limited, fixed, 10-segment game. This saves me a lot of time in coding in the game, mostly because I can control a majority of the variables within the game and thus save myself a bunch of hassle when it comes to reinforcing the lessons taught.
• Tuesday, began (re)framing the game once more. I lost a couple of hours to a flight, so these hours were done pretty late at night in a very weird-ish timezone. This overlapped into Wednesday, and I only realized the missing day until the time of writing this blog. That being said, I established a pretty good guideline for what I needed to do and how the general execution would look like.
• Wednesday, lost day. Also jet lag.
• Thursday, I did more work on the game format. Refined the pseudocode that I was going to use, started drafting pseudocode for the menus. Did some last-minute research on effective stock market strategies to stuff into the game, and on top of doing that added a couple of more NPC tooltips to help the player along a “learning path”.
  • Giving players a general idea of how a stock functions but not its predicted values, which is kind of lenient but also forces the player to think about the stock price for once.
  • Pattern recognition is key for this game, so I decided to reinforce that. Gave stocks some personality, some extra behavior. 

• Friday, made up for a couple of extra hours missed on that Tuesday/Wednesday. Polished up a general timeline of the weeks, wrote some extra information for quarterly earnings (and had to do a bit of extensive research on how I was going to determine how the stock prices would change from those quarterly earnings). In the end, I decided to create a general boost to most stocks’ prices, giving the player a tiny boost in their income and to reward them for investing aggressively prior to the quarterly earnings release.

Overall, a hopeful start. Praying that coding and polish next week won’t take 50 hours instead of 15.