As promised in my previous post, I have kept the next release of Network Traders really small. Version 0.5.1 allows you to build a new building, the wheelwright. This building increases the transport capacity of your merchants, and allows them to trade more goods with your fellow traders.
What the wheelwright does is fairly simple. It is a so-called “transport capacity” building, same as the basket maker, but a little more expensive. While the basket maker allows your merchants to carry 3 units of any goods, this capacity is increased to 4 units with the wheelwright. The process of trading is described in this article about the merchants in Network Traders in detail. But simply put, merchants look for new trade opportunities as long as they have goods to trade in their packs. If all of their goods – 4 with a wheelwright – have been traded away they seek the shortest way back to you to bring home their gainings.
More Features in Version 0.5.1
Apart from the wheelwright building, version 0.5.1.0 brings two more improvements. One is a shortcoming of the font I use, which was pointed out to me a couple of times already and which I struggled with myself. The characters for ‘1’ and ‘7’ looked very much alike. So I tried to improve the font a little by adding a cross-bar to the ‘7’. Hopefully, it will now be easier to see how many goods you need for the next building.
And finally, I tweaked the display process for advertisements a little. With Unity Ads, your app needs to have enough time to load ads into its cache before it is able to show the first one. To prevent failures here, I added a waiting popup to inform the players about the possible short delay. In addition, I made sure that the app starts loading a new ad as soon as possible. So hopefully, you will see the popup very rarely.
What’s Next?
For the follow-up version 0.5.2 I plan to implement a convenience feature that has already been requested many times. The city name of each player is generated randomly and only this name is used inside the game. That is on purpose, as I want to keep privacy of my players at a maximum. However, it soon gets difficult to keep track of who is behind which city, so I will add a nickname field to each city. You will be able to add a name or a note to each city, which will help you remember who you traded with.
Have you played the new version 0.5.1 already? What do you think about it? I would appreciate any feedback here or in the Fediverse.