While doing some miscellaneous coding and design-related stuff for “Phase 2” of Project “W”, I had a sudden inspiration for a new feature in order to get more dynamics into the gameplay. The new feature I therefore implemented is a stock market. Nothing revolutionary (I guess most games similar to Project “W” have that feature too) but it’s bringing much more dynamics into the game’s flow. In “Phase 1”, you can only make resources with the regions themselves, but the new stock market will allow you to make a lot of resources (or loose a lot) within a short amount of time, but with a lot of risk. On the surface, this feature looks straight forward, but it’s a bit more complicated in terms of implementing. One thing you cannot simply do is to calculate random values for the stock prices, as that would make it look random and unrealistic. Therefore each corporation at the stock market has a current trend (rising, stagnating, falling) that’ll change after several days, as well as a risk factor. A company with a low risk will have fewer trend changes but it’s share will never explode or go down the drain. The shares of a company with a high risk on the opposite may explode at one point and give you a lot of resources, but may also have you loose a lot of money. So in the end it’s up to the player whether he wants to risk a lot and win/loose a lot or if he wants to invest into a more stable share. Note : The companies traded at the stock market are global companies not tied to any of the nations, with each company specialized in one area, e.g. military or chemicals. Also note that the list on the screenshots is not final, “Phase 2” will contain a lot more companies.
And if you look at the screenshots closely you’ll spot that the control center has now changed a bit. Instead of six buttons, there are now eight buttons. One additional for accessing the stock market and an additional one for directly accessing the unit construction window. I wanted to have the later one in from the very beginning, but that would have left me with an odd number of buttons in “Phase 1”. Together with other small changes in the user interface it makes the game even more accessible now.