Week 8: Blog 8 (Detailed Analysis of Economies in MMOs)

Nearing the final stretch, and while I am a little behind, I am still making a fairly decent pace. Recap of this week below.

• Monday, I realized that price adjustments needed to be made. Graphing the prices that I had made, I noticed that the highest change was quite… small, around 8% at most. Considering the current state of the economy and how prices are in severe chaos due to extraordinary circumstances, I decided to “inflate” the changes in the stock pricing in order to hammer home the reward system of making good decisions. Probably my best decision yet. Additionally, I added a quick evaluation to the end of the game, highlighting any mistakes made during the game, such as holding onto stocks of a company that goes bankrupt.
• Tuesday, I turned my attention back to Godot to continue implementing the code. Over the break, I did migrate the code over (which I had to do again today) and managed to get a very basic UI to work (which I did have to make adjustments to today). Today, I managed to fix a couple of bugs and errors that were being thrown at me from the editor, including positions not setting themselves and horizontal containers refusing to work. I was able to implement enough buttons to the point where I was able to roughly navigate the menu, similar to what the text-based version does.
• Wednesday, I met with my external advisor and made some changes to my code accordingly. Instead of letting the player gather an unlimited amount of information, I decided to implement a time system where the player can only gather a few pieces of information at a time. Additionally, by separating the information into categories and forcing the player to select where they want to research in (ex. the news, product reviews, etc.), it should reflect more accurately to the real world as not everyone has unlimited time.
• Thursday was a pretty uneventful day. Aside from one bugfix that was bugging me, I worked mainly on the slides and got a majority of the presentation done (aside from some images from Godot that I need to import later, once the visual part is actually finished). It was harder than expected to summarize the main challenges of this project into only one slide — there were so many!
• Friday, I worked on getting a game loop to work. It was mainly a tedious process of hooking up functions to buttons, praying that it would work, crashing out when a new bug showed up, and spending 20 minutes getting sidetracked solving the minor bug. In the end, however, I did manage to get the buy and sell functions working and a very rough prototype of how I wanted the information gathering to look like. This also brought to my attention that I need an actual font, which I will likely be doing over the weekend.