Patents
I thought I would quickly share a couple of screenshots to explain how to the "patent" mechanic will work. The idea is that at some point later in the game, you will start facing competitors trying to copy your better features. You'll see a message like this:
As the text explains, a copied feature incurs a rating penalty. Your options are to ignore and let it happen (can be a valid choice), or patent the feature. Features that are being copied will be flashing so you will be able to identify them. You can file a patent from the feature details screen:
Patenting has an upfront cash cost, and will use up operations effort. Both go up exponentially based on the size of the feature so you'll want to think twice about patenting every feature.
Once the feature is patented, you'll see a special striped border around it:
I'm still trying to balance this feature so the numbers are all still being changed, but so far I'm happy with the overall design and I think it adds another dimension to the game.
Infrastructure
Besides the patent mechanic, I also wanted to pay a bit of attention to the infrastructure section. There are two changes I'm making here for the next release:
- Adding a "detail" view. One the of the things that was sorely lacking here is numbers. You will now be able to see a few key information such as visitor vs user traffic being generated in each data center, how much traffic is coming into a data center from outside (i.e. from other data centers that are not active), and most importantly the exact server load that is being used in each data center.
- Currently the spread of visitor traffic among regions is randomized at first but remains constant throughout each game. I am changing this so that throughout the game there are occasional shifts in where visitors are coming from. This should keep this part of a the game more dynamic and make you need to keep in top of where it's best to place servers.
I'm still a couple of weeks away form uploading this update; mostly focused on play-testing and balancing. It'll get there soon :)