Okay, so I got both a lot less and a lot more done in the past week than I’d hoped. Wait, week? Was it a week? Two? Week and a half? What even IS time? Regardless, it’s partly because I actually let myself relax a bit – saw friends, went on photography expeditions, and just generally made my time off work just a bit more holiday and a bit less… work

But then there’s the fact that what I ended up doing took more work than I’d presumed. Or, rather, I forced it to take longer.

So let me explain…

When I first sat down to write this, I thought maybe I’d gotten to do it for another fortnight again, like last time. But no, I just got a crapton done because I’m off work fro the year so I’ve been working almost full-time on Deck & Conn for a few days now.

Here’s where we’re at now…

A lot got done in the last little while. In short:

• Selectors and movement code on the sector map
• Scanning UI
• Map Rendering moved into a generic function
• Animated ships
• Action Queues
• New Turn Logic & Interface
• Quadrant View!
• Tons ‘o refactoring

So let’s get into what I did and why…

It’s been a hot minute since I did a dev log, and that’s partly because what I ended up doing in the last little while took a lot more time than expected – or, more to the point, I got a lot more done than I expected.

In short, I worked on world generation, some pen ‘n paper UI design and fixed a pile of bugs I’d missed.

So, the last few days I’ve been working on Deck & Conn, but… not much that’s exciting. Not to anyone seeing visual progress, that is. In fact, really only ONE new front-facing feature was added. What I was actually doing, however, was quite interesting to me, and very useful for the project as a whole. So here’s a run-down, starting with back-end changes and ending on the major front-end one.

This is a quick blog post being written before Day Job(tm), but I’m going to try to cover what I ended up doing with my rather heavy development day yesterday. Note: I’ve gotten in the habit, for this project, of taking both screen caps (or partial ones), and small videos to illustrate things I had just implemented. I’m hoping this means by the end of the project I will not only have these development logs, but even more detail showing the progress of the game over time.

Given last log post was mostly an introduction, and I’ve produced a big steaming helping of code since then, I might as well explain what I’ve been doing and why.

So, I’ve (as always) got quite a few projects on the go. I can’t NOT make things, apparently. From dioramas to wargaming scenery for a friend to an app idea to a pretty sizeable game project.

Something I decided I want to do, for mental health reasons, is to finish something. And quickly. Not, like, ‘in a week’ or something absurd like that, but to do what I’ve often found is useful in the past – pick a small, manageable project, and ship it.

This means several things:

1. The game design must be pretty solid
2. The game design must be pretty simple
3. I must be passionate about it, or I will lose interest over time
4. I will make it with the simplest tools I can

This will be (partly to keep myself accountable) a development log of my journey making it.