# Overview

for Ludum Dare 56, we wrote Interstellar Cargo Maidens. A space shipping game/economy simulation game. This was an interesting lesson in just how hard is it to make a functional economy in a video game. Once again, Kiri knocked the art out of the park, and our final scores came out pretty well for something niche like this.

The original ludum dare page can be found here

# Lessons

I originally intended to write a fully simulated economy with AI pilots that would compete with the player for good deals. this quickly spiraled out of control and made the game either extremely difficult, or extremely broken depending on how many AI pilots were running.

A lot of my inspirations of the trading was from an old game called Hardwar, which I played in my youth. The game itself isn’t very deep, but all of the factories needed to be supplied with their requisite parts to produce anything, so especially in longer running games, heavy piracy would just break the economy, and it could make it impossible to buy new ships.

In the end, I chose to just fudge everything with some moving averages and random number generators, with some specific carve outs for lowering demand after trades are completed, and raising prices when stock is purchased.

# Tech

The game is written in Haxe, using my usual Cerastes framework (which itself builds on top of heaps).

# Play now

The current web build can be found here.