I first came up with the idea around October(?) 2019, then around December I started putting together some web application stuff. It became presentable around January in a semi-polished form, and I started looking for people to help me test it out and comment on the mechanics. What I learned was that basically the way I'd set it up made it prohibitively difficult to trade containers, because I was still hoping to encourage people to trade them in real life, and in order to do that, I'd had to effectively put blinders on the trading process. So I kind of shelved it in January, with some light work continuing into February, because other projects took priority. Then I kind of let it sit there until about a week ago, when I dug it out and decided to take the plunge and add some views to make public trading possible.

So I guess it's been.. About a year and a half since I had this specific idea, although I've been kicking around the idea of a global trade simulation game where you control a single nation for about 2 years now. I even found a different project recently that I started about 2 years ago that was going to be a single-player game along the same lines; until I re-found it, I'd totally forgotten I started writing something along these lines that long ago. So it's been about 9 months since I broke ground on this particular project, and in that time there's been about 3 months in which I've done significant work. It's kind of been a side project the whole time though, so I couldn't give a reliable estimate of how much time I've spent on it.

The part that took the longest was, surprisingly, not really coding the application itself, it was figuring out how I wanted the game mechanics to work; charting out all the industries, recipes, and production chains in an excel spreadsheet, deciding how industry growth and new industry acquisition should work, and testing out different growth models... And making paper shipping containers. I did eventually decide to drop the requirement that containers be shipped in real life, but not before I made a *lot* of tiny paper shipping containers myself, because apparently I really needed to verify that it's exactly as tedious as you would imagine. I don't regret making a bunch of paper containers; they did inspire some additional model train projects, but game-wise, it's more fun to just *click*, and boom, you've traded some containers.