Kind of a late update… usually I try to do this late Sunday night, but it is now late Tuesday night.

The last week was pretty bad, there were several factors – I guess it might be interesting to some reader to know that there is a human being at the end of this – or maybe it is completely boring – anyway last Monday I visited the dentist for a crown after a root canal. Took very long since nowadays they literally 3D scan your mouth and then carve up a tooth out of a ceramic block – on site. Either way I was burned out, so Monday was out.

Tuesday I spent fighting a crash bug that cropped up when formations were disbanded/deleted. Pretty silly bug, took forever to find, but as usual I was very happy to have fixed. Some bad news on Wednesday – the HUD/GUI artist that was working with me has had a string of unfortunate events and can’t reasonably deliver for the project. This actually reminds me that I’m very lucky to be able to work on this project, given how much “free” time it requires. A reminder that not everyone is as lucky as I am and that is something I shouldn’t forget when I feel down or burned out of what not.

Wednesday – at my “day job” once a year a bit of a shake up happens and the office crew (which I’m part off) has to go to the warehouse and count inventory. This is unfortunately extremely exhausting (since it often involves physically lifting often heavy material), mind numbing and a bunch of other negative aspects. So the rest of the week was spent like that and when I got home later than usual I tried to focus on little things and surprisingly got a bunch of things done – mainly little improvements to tactical mode. It is not as rigid as it was before and hopefully much more user friendly. I should create a post just on this, or maybe a video.

Weekend - I wanted something quick and easy so I wanted to create a “rally” system. Where the player would first select a base or a shipyard then right click on the map and have ships go to that spot on launch from the shipyard. This was easy, and I fairly quickly set this up (in terms of basic functionality) and then I thought – hmm why not integrate the new formation system? This is where things took a turn for the worse. I spent a lot of time (practically all of Sunday) trying to jam the formation system into the rally system. I kept writing code, deleting it, restoring from a backup of previous code, etc etc. I finally gave up Sunday night and decided to keep the code separate. A few moments ago I setup a fairly decent rally system, so at least that’s that.

So what’s next? I want to put out Iteration 18 soon – I have to add in saving/loading to the formation system and the rally system, do a bunch of bug tests, finish up new story content for the Kickstarter Beta backers and then release. So seemingly a bunch of work, hopefully it will go smooth

In other news – I’ve started contracting out “graphics/effects” programming work. This is an area where I struggle a lot so I thought contracting this work out would be more efficient, so far some promising developments. This will also mean that I’ll learn a bit so overall should be a huge win for the project.