Recap

For September I wanted to 1) hook up my UI to make actual state changes in the game and 2) add a UI for active projects.

Results

I'd say things went great! I actually got the UI hooked up relatively quickly and was able to take a lot of time for the projects. I even got a little further and was able to add a passage of time that allows for actually completing projects as well.

Here you can see the three new UI elements of my strategy layer game mode: The Shipyard button to the upper-ish left, the Time UI on the lower left and the Projects scroll bar to the lower right. The Marketplace still has all the instantaneous transactions that can be used to trade resources back and forth. The starting "Stardate" of 413469 doesn't really mean anything, it was just a random 6-digit number.

Here's the Projects UI after accessing the Shipyard and selecting to build a Battleship, Cruiser, Destroyer and Frigate. You'll notice that some of the resources have changed too indicating that resources were spent to queue up those construction projects. The first number after the project is the total days until completion (project time plus preceding queue time), the next is the individual project time. The next three grey boxes are the queue controls (from left to right) move up, move down and cancel. I wasn't motivated enough to find art for them right at the moment.

The Destroyer project used to be the third priority, now it's number two (using the 'move up' button). You can see that both the Destroyer's and Cruiser's total time to completion have been updated to reflect the new priority order.

The Destroyer project is now the number one priority (this time using the 'move down' button on the Battleship project). Again, the total time to completion for the re-ordered projects has been updated.

The Cruiser project was canceled and the total completion time for the later project (Construct Frigate) has had it's completion time updated.

This is after passing three days, Stardate 413472. The Destroyer project has been removed and the Battleship project only has 1 day removed from it's remaining time. At this point if you opened up the Launch Mission or Configure ships UI's, there would be a three Destroyer class ships (two starting ships and the one constructed by the project). Trust me

I hit a few technical debt things, but nothing from my backlog. Just things directly related to what I was doing with the UI for the projects work.

I also did an interesting (to me) shift of some code from one class to another (related) class. This was a bit of an experiment to see what the code would look like with this change. My game state is stored in a pretty similar way to my project at work and wanted to see if moving this API would improve the use and reliability of the code. I think it does so I committed the change to my project and started a side project at work of a similar refactor.

October Goals

It's time to move onto something not transaction related, three months is a long time to be working on the same feature even if it is only part-time. It would be nice if I could keep it to two, one for gameplay and one for UI (at least when dealing with strategy systems). If I could get all the gameplay and UI done in a single month that'd be cool but I'm trying my best to set myself up for working on this project when I'm not feeling up to it. Don't want to burn out on development.

My main goal is to work on a Strategy Map. My vision is basically a graph where the star systems are the nodes and the edges are the valid transits between them, something like:

The real UI should obviously look a bit better, but it should give you an idea. I laid some groundwork for this last month, so I have state and definitions available for the Star Systems and Routes. I also stubbed in classes that will be used as the bases for my tactical and strategy map generators. Most of this sprint should be implementing a first (fairly trivial) strategy map generator and building a UI to display the state data I've already defined.

Games I'm Playing

Still playing Fate/Grand Order and Fire Emblem. My second playthrough has been interesting if a little boring.  The first half of the game appears to be more or less identical regardless of the house that you're playing so that's a little boring. Plus everyone is way over-leveled because I can do way more extra battles than I could in the first go-around. I just got past the time skip so I'm hoping the story diverges a bit more from here on out. Both my Blue Lions playthrough and this Golden Deer playthrough have been Normal/Casual. I'll probably jump right to Madding/Casual for the last two story lines when I play them.