This morning while we were listening to the 6th episode of the Incoming Transmission Podcast, I realised I must clean up something about the market. In the beginning, the insurance prices were based on the actual trading price of the robots. (Plus a multiplier to be correct.) This was a very nice dynamic system on paper, and a rather pivotal part of the game. By that time we were too busy to check the market rates graph frequently, and on top of that when I checked it I fed myself with freshly crafted theories to explain why does that look odd.

Despite many warnings from many players I didn't do anything, because I was so convinced by my own little theories. This was a terrible mistake that resulted in insurance frauds. (... link to a very long story here ... ) I can talk about this for hours but to keep it short, I was so sure it would all be fine, the game is just starting and that's why the graph is so empty/odd and it will boil itself down to a natural balanced level. But it didn't. As a result we changed the whole system to a more predictable one. Currently we are still monitoring the sales, but we are setting the insurance prices manually. This period was the left one on the image.

After that things went well, the market collected the prices properly and we were happy campers. Later on before the Terra Incognita patch I managed to put a new bug in, which ruined the graph again. When I realised it there was no way back - we weren't able to deploy a hotfix until the expansion. During this period the repair prices were based on the raw material sales, so the workaround was that I logged in periodically and made some fake sales. FAKE SALES????!!! WHAT?! Yes, I sold and bought randomly one (1) from each raw material so the underlying mechanism had some data to work with. This was enough to keep it going. See the second bugged period on the graph when I had to cheat the price filter mechanism. After that came the expansion and since then it's all good again. You can see these periods in every item's global rates graph.

This is how little bugs can ripple through the system causing trouble.

It's time to take a good old roflcopter for a ride and report you from a recent hilarious happening from our beloved Avatar Creations office of fun.

As you may expect from indie game developers, our daily nutrition-intake is largely homogeneous at best, and can be usually expressed with what our friends in Britain would characterize as "beans on toast". To this end, when the game launched, I decided to traverse to the local kitchen appliance store and surprise ourselves with a wonderful sandwich grill, to spice up our otherwise dull circulation of carbohydrates.

The grill has served us wonderfully for a few months, until it's untimely demise when encountering a larger piece of pastry, at which point the structural composition of the object underwent a major realignment:

It was a tragic casualty, but after much grieving, we carried on. Then today, tragedy struck again, as the trusty office toaster, which has served us for the entire duration of the Perpetuum development, has inexplicably caught fire and nearly proceeded to burn through the bottom of the cupboard, only to be carefully unplugged and shoved in the kitchen sink by yours truly in a haphazard but effective manner.

Forensics have later revealed that the culprit was quite possibly the ejection lever lodging in halfway, either due to hardware failure or the toast itself wedging between the rim and the metal framing, which has caused the heater mechanism to switch from "medium well" to "meteor shower", and eventually "thermal ammo AOE attack", cheerfully melting the plastic framing itself in the meantime and looking wistfully towards the wooden cupboard bottom.

So yeah, we're one toaster down, and I'm still hungry. However, on the plus side, rest assured this will not serve as a hindrance on our development schedule.