We're very excited to share with you all that Trade Bots will have its version 1.0 release on April 18th. We deeply appreciate your patience as we've been hard at work improving the game. We made the decision to completely refactor the simulation engine from the ground up, improving simulation speeds up to 20x. This is particularly useful in the late game, where speeds of over 1000 days/s is possible, even on legacy hardware. This total refactor did, of course, lead to a number of unexpected bugs that we're still trying to iron out in pre-release beta testing.
We've also included the ability to listen, directly in-game, to a number of popular financial podcasts while you play. As you hit higher net worth milestones, more podcasts become available until ultimately you can select your own.
Our non-profit has also settled on the price point of $12.99 (with a 15% launch discount). Determining a price point that reflects the magnitude of work and effort poured into the project while also trying to accommodate the most diverse audience possible is a very difficult balance, one we believe we struck. While this is our non-profit's most expensive game to-date, it has also been the most expensive and complex to develop by far, and we believe the quality of the product reflects that.
Of course, we still plan on making the game freely available to teachers and students. This will be after the initial launch period so we can focus entirely on patching any bugs found by the community. The publish date for the site where students and teachers can redeem free codes will be announced within the first month of release.
A few features will not make it into this initial release but will be added in (free) updates. These include:
- Modular nodes in advanced bots (making your own nodes as nested sequences of other nodes)
- Paper / Backtesting modes in advanced bots
- Leaderboards
- Custom Data Import
We will note that neural networks and bot import/export features are in beta and that we also hope to integrate more features suggested by the community, as in my experience those tend to be the most rewarding and fruitful.
Again, thank you for your patience and for making it possible for us to do what we're most passionate about, creating fun, engaging and educational games for all of you. Please reach out to us at [email protected] with any questions or just to say "hi". We'd love to hear from you.
Thanks!