Company Obligations And The First Proper Pressure Loop

Today was mostly focused on the systems that sit around the Egg Market, rather than the act of trading itself.

The important thing with Eggonomics is that buying and selling eggs should not exist in isolation. The player is not meant to be interacting with a clean stock market interface where profit is the only measure of success. They are working inside a closed corporate economy, where The Company owns the market, the warehouse, the tax authority, the office, the communication channels and the definition of whether or not the Employee is performing acceptably.

For that reason, the next step has been to make the player's financial position matter to more than just the balance display.

Quota

The first version of the quota system is now working in the backend.

Each player has their own quota state for the active cycle. The cycle itself is shared, but the target is calculated from the player's starting net worth when their cycle state is created. Net worth is currently based on their Company Credits, their held eggs at the current market price, and any pending liabilities owed to The Company.

This means quota is not just a flat global number. A newer or poorer player should not be judged in the same way as a player who has already accumulated a large position. The Company is unfair, but it is not meant to be mechanically unreadable. It should feel like a system with rules, even if those rules are uncomfortable.

Failure is also intended to be soft. Missing quota should not instantly destroy the player or wipe their progress. Instead, the shortfall can become Company debt, increase scrutiny and make future cycles slightly more hostile. The aim is to create pressure over time, rather than a single hard fail state that ends the run.

Tax And Storage

Trade settlement now has the first version of tax accounting.

When the player sells eggs, the backend can track realised profit for the current cycle, and positive realised profit creates tax liability. Losses can offset gains inside the cycle, but the player cannot create negative tax as a reward for bad trading. The Company is generous, but not in that direction.

Warehouse storage has also started to matter. The player's current egg balance is treated as warehouse-held stock, with a free capacity before overflow fees begin to build. For this beta version, buying over capacity is not blocked. Instead, the system records the overflow and calculates a storage fee liability.

This matters because Eggonomics is intended to have delayed consequences. Holding eggs should be a position with a cost, not just a number that sits in the corner of the UI. The player can choose to carry inventory, but The Company is allowed to charge rent on the space it says they are using.

The Economy Status API

The game client now receives a more complete economy status payload from the backend.

This includes the player's credits, eggs, current market price, current net worth, pending liabilities, storage overflow, quota progress, tax liability, storage fee liability and the current cycle information. The reason for doing this in the backend is that the server is authoritative, and the client should mainly be concerned with presenting state and submitting decisions.

In practical terms, this should make the Unreal side easier to work with. Rather than trying to reconstruct economy state in Blueprint from several unrelated responses, the client can request one status object and display the parts of it that matter to the player.

This also helps with reconnect behaviour. Since Eggonomics is being designed for mobile, the client has to assume that network connection can drop, degrade or recover at any time. The correct response is not to rely on a perfect continuous connection, but to fetch the current authoritative state when the player returns.

Market Visibility

There has also been work on the market graph and how the player reads price movement.

The earlier graph followed fine-grained movement too closely, which made it feel more unstable than it needed to be. The actual market price is integer based, so the visual presentation should respect that, rather than implying that there is a hidden float value underneath the player's decision making.

The current direction is to make the graph update in clearer intervals, support ticks and candles, and allow the player to inspect recent history without the UI becoming too noisy or expensive on mobile hardware. There is also a web-rendered graph experiment, which allows more modern visual styling while the native Unreal UI can still hold the surrounding controls.

The goal is not just to make the graph look better. It is to make the market more legible, so players can form beliefs, make decisions and then be punished or rewarded by a system they at least had a chance to interpret.

Admin And Community Tools

The admin side has continued to become more useful for observing the live system.

NPC traders now have more stable personality traits, the market has mood controls, and telemetry can be inspected so that behaviour can be tuned instead of guessed. This is important because the market should feel alive, but it also needs to remain understandable enough that problems can be found and corrected.

The website and Discord tools have also moved forward. The site now has clearer beta status, Discord links, a newsletter signup and a place for development updates like this one. There is also a Discord bot watching beta availability and market information, so the community can follow the state of the game without needing to be inside the editor or dashboard.

Why This Matters

Eggonomics is not intended to be a traditional power fantasy about becoming rich.

The player can make money, and they should be able to get better at reading the market, but the larger point is participation inside a system that is bigger than them. The Company does not need to be fair to be consistent, and it does not need to be openly hostile to become oppressive.

Quota, tax, warehouse fees and audit pressure are the first parts of that wider loop. They turn trading into something with consequences beyond the immediate buy or sell action. They make the office, the market and The Company feel more connected.

The intended loop is still simple at a high level: observe the market, make a decision, carry the outcome, meet quota where possible, pay what is owed, and use whatever remains to improve the office or survive the next cycle.

The current work is about making that loop real enough to test.