It's Monday, and I like to write up a progress report on my game every Monday so people can know what's up with it.

In regards to what progress I made last week: not much.

• I taught my turrets to rotate towards things to the west of them correctly when they go "pew pew pew." As mentioned last week, there's some difficulty when doing this after taking it from an arctan because -180 becomes 180 when it's dead west. It was causing the turrets to rotate 360 extra degrees.
• I defined some "commodity" objects that represent the core resources in the game: food/organics, energy, mass, and "native biomass" - a sort of mysterious hybrid material that comes from the natives. (The names are not final.) M.U.L.E. players might recognize a similarity to food, energy, smithore, and crystite.
• I made it so missiles fly between things when resources are transferred between them, which is crude but certainly looks lively.
• Many, many minor bug fixes. Though a programmer/designer gets better at this thing with practice, elimination of human error or compensation for computer limitation is an ever-present detail in development.

As I observe my game right now, it's looking like I'm about to launch into another brainstorming phase.

Sure, I've a good deal of backbone established here, a game that plays itself, but what I really need to look into adding at this point is meaningful player involvement. Choices a player will make that make a real difference between victory and defeat. I have some (e.g. how to build one's base) but whenever I add a new element to the game, I want to ask myself what kind of choice it brings to it.

Virtual Development Vs. Real Life

I've currently two things interfering with my usual development process:

1. I'm back in school, sitting about the campus for 40 hours a week.
2. Champions Online, a game I'd been waiting for the release of for over a year, is now out.

My weekend was largely spent engorged in Champions Online. The way I see it, the quicker I get bored of the game, the quicker my free time will be focused back on developing mine. At 3 days of play, I'm already level 27 out of 40. At this rate, I may well have the content exhausted by next weekend.

School actually emerges as a great place for a lot of development to take place. As I said, I'm trapped here some 40 hours out of the week. Classes and homework take up about half of that. The rest is me sitting here bored at school with a laptop that really can't run Champions Online (I opted for a model without an NVIDIA/ATI video card - quite deliberately).

Yea or Nay

That last post of mine certainly attracted a lot of "nays." It's boggling because I've no idea what they're they're naying against, exactly. It's a bit like saying: "BLUE! Yea or Nay?!"

What? Are you asking if I like blue? Are you asking if I think there's something wrong with people who like blue? Is it if I'm feeling blue? Is the sky blue where I live?

It doesn't say, it's just asking Yay or Nay. I think I'd be just as boggled if I garnered a lot of "Yea," but at least I wouldn't be worried I'm doing something wrong.

If you have anything reasonable to object to what I'm doing, I'm not against accepting feedback. Just use the comment thread, because what I'm getting out of "yea" or "nay" tells me nothing when no question had been asked.

Well, look at the time. I'd best get to class.