Software Inc.

Software Inc.

Expanse (Beta 1) | Software, Hardware and More
 This topic has been pinned, so it's probably important
MrNewcity  [developer] 4 Aug, 2020 @ 3:04am
Suggestions
Please post software, feature, and balancing suggestions here.
Last edited by MrNewcity; 10 Nov, 2020 @ 5:05pm
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Showing 1-15 of 15 comments
Hueman 11 Aug, 2020 @ 11:33pm 
You should add more default maps.
Ferret 10 Nov, 2020 @ 3:33pm 
Database program as an Office Software option would be a nice completion to that category (though I find it quite hard to come up with sub-categories for everything else, especially in the volume that Office Software or Games have). i happen to be a database programmer if you need suggestions on features for such an office software category.

I'd kinda like to know what all different software categories affect (other than fans/ market saturation) like ideal market targeting or sale-defining values. If the differences are actually worth juggling multiple software categories then I'd like to see more of those.

The three star options on most software seem underwhelming, especially when they come with risk. I'd like to see a much higher reward that comes with the added dev time that makes it worth it. Perhaps a priority support service that generates a small percentage of the software price for 25% of all users per month, but also increases support tickets.Or Open-sourced code that fixes half of all bugs reported thru support (crafty users submit the fixes along with the reports) but also decreases sells (crafty pirates exploit the transparency) Or a streaming platform integration that generates much more hype and retains it and increases the potency of post-marketing or even does some automatically to reflect the added attention drawn to your game by the crowd-sourced marketing courtesy of content creators. Or a Software As A Service model that decreases overall software price (perhaps even down to zero) but generates a percentage of what it would have been priced at per month per user but users either decrease faster over time than normal or require frequent expansions (in the future) before curving suddenly. In short, I'd like to actually want to use the 3-star features.

Ferret 10 Nov, 2020 @ 4:01pm 
To re-summarize and provide new ideas, I would like the 3-star options to be the defining aspect of the software. If I end up getting a lawsuit, I want it to have been worth it either in a significant increase in sales, ease of development or ease of post support/marketing.

Some more examples would be Microphone surveillance also generating monthly income to reflect selling the data to analytic companies (because fixing more bugs doesn't seem worthy of risking a lawsuit). Or Super Optimization actually affecting in-house hardware by decreasing hardware costs. Or Bitmining and Datamining giving 5% of price instead of only .10-.25. This is a prime example of something that in its current state is never worth it IMO since it equates to a bit over $1-2.5M per 1M user per year.

I like Included Soundcard as it is. Virtual Assistant is almost good as is but I think it either needs to be more potent in its current affect (bug reports slowly resolve over time) or instead generate income and fix bugs (before reported thru support) to reflect anonymous and LEGAL user data collection and analysis for, ahem, "third party analytic services", aka legal data selling.
MrNewcity  [developer] 10 Nov, 2020 @ 5:39pm 
I will keep database software in mind as a potential future software type, that could definitely be interesting.

Different categories of software do have different values for submarket satisfaction and popularity. In some cases, different categories have different values for the amount of time the software takes to develop and the retention time for the software. Of course, those values aren't really shown in game, I guess the idea is you're supposed to kinda have to experiment and find out for yourself. But if you want to know the values for different categories, I can send them to you if you'd like.

You might be right that some 3-star features may need some further balancing in the future, I have to do more testing with those features to be honest. Those seem like pretty decent ideas for 3-star features though, and I think they would be doable. I do try to add interesting 3-star features, I just need to get better with the custom language that they are written in, as I'm not really a coder lol. So far I have stuck somewhat close to existing vanilla 3-star scripts, because that way I know that they will work, but I hope to venture further away from that as I get better at doing them myself. As far as your Software-as-a-service idea, subscriptions are coming in a future game update, so I don't really see much reason in doing a feature for that at the moment.

Thanks for the suggestions though, and I will definitely keep your feedback in mind in the future. :)
Last edited by MrNewcity; 10 Nov, 2020 @ 5:40pm
Ferret 10 Nov, 2020 @ 7:09pm 
That would be nice if you could send me those values easily enough. It might help give me a better understanding of what is possible.

I took a look at the coding language they have. It looks potent for sure.

Thanks for saying that bit about the subscriptions coming soon. I thought I saw that somewhere on their Trello board but could not find it again last night.

Thanks again for the great mod.
MrNewcity  [developer] 10 Nov, 2020 @ 10:18pm 
Originally posted by Ferret:
That would be nice if you could send me those values easily enough. It might help give me a better understanding of what is possible.

I took a look at the coding language they have. It looks potent for sure.

Thanks for saying that bit about the subscriptions coming soon. I thought I saw that somewhere on their Trello board but could not find it again last night.

Thanks again for the great mod.

So, for example, here is the categories section for Office software:

Categories
[
{
Name "Word Processor"
Description "For typing words"
Popularity 0.7
Retention 16
TimeScale 1
Iterative 1
NameGenerator namer_wordprocessor
Submarkets [ 1; 2; 0 ]
}
{
Name "Presentation"
Description "For making slides"
Popularity 0.7
Retention 16
TimeScale 1
Iterative 1
NameGenerator namer_presentation
Submarkets [ 1; 1; 2 ]
}
{
Name "Spreadsheet"
Description "For graphing numbers"
Popularity 0.65
Retention 16
TimeScale 1
Iterative 1
NameGenerator namer_spreadsheet
Submarkets [ 0; 1; 0 ]
}
{
Name "Publisher"
Description "For creating layouts"
Popularity 0.65
Retention 16
TimeScale 1
Iterative 1
NameGenerator namer_publisher
Submarkets [ 1; 2; 1 ]
}
]

So for office software, the popularity and submarket satisfaction changes for different categories. Retention and time does not, but for some other software types it does, such as Operating systems.
Ferret 11 Nov, 2020 @ 3:46pm 
Oh cool flexibility there. Thank you for the info.
It appears that DB software in real life has much less popularity but greater cost and much higher retention. IRL, I am using DB software that has 2010 framework on an IP that started in 1985, lol.
MrNewcity  [developer] 11 Nov, 2020 @ 4:21pm 
Originally posted by Ferret:
Oh cool flexibility there. Thank you for the info.
It appears that DB software in real life has much less popularity but greater cost and much higher retention. IRL, I am using DB software that has 2010 framework on an IP that started in 1985, lol.

Haha yeah, high cost, low popularity is a bit hard to do in this game for some reason, as even software at 0.01 popularity will often still sell millions of copies, so making the cost too high just makes it really unbalanced.
kerrigan 28 Nov, 2020 @ 12:55am 
Any chance of a feature to allow software releases before a supported OS is released? Seems ridiculous that the base game doesn't allow this and seems up this mods alley.
MrNewcity  [developer] 29 Nov, 2020 @ 1:56am 
Originally posted by kerrigan:
Any chance of a feature to allow software releases before a supported OS is released? Seems ridiculous that the base game doesn't allow this and seems up this mods alley.

Do you mean like, you want to be able to release, for example, a 3D editor before OSes that support 3D are released? Because the only way to get around that would be to remove the OS dependency, so that the software would just be on its own without an OS. Which would not really make sense for most software types.
jerskk 28 Apr, 2022 @ 8:58am 
Not sure if you're still taking suggestions (or how hard these things are to add) but having Tablet, Smart Speaker and Smart TV OS would be amazing.
MrNewcity  [developer] 29 Apr, 2022 @ 1:29pm 
Originally posted by jerskk:
Not sure if you're still taking suggestions (or how hard these things are to add) but having Tablet, Smart Speaker and Smart TV OS would be amazing.
Nice ideas. To be honest, tablet and Smart TV OS are unlikely just because they are pretty similar to Phone OS and Console OS which are already in the game. Smart speaker is definitely a possibility for the future though :steamthumbsup:
Jakey_Jakester 4 Dec, 2022 @ 5:43pm 
Would you ever consider adding Computer component hardware? Also would you consider adding VR OS?
MrNewcity  [developer] 10 Dec, 2022 @ 8:44pm 
Originally posted by Jakey_Jakester:
Would you ever consider adding Computer component hardware? Also would you consider adding VR OS?

Hey there, I actually have considered VR OS in the past, and who knows, it may come at some point in the future. Computer component hardware doesn't really fit my style, but there are other mods that do that I believe! Thanks for the suggestions.
Add an Emulator category to OS.
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