Technically, I had 10 days off, and I've already wasted 3 days of it. Granted, I had a fairly good excuse...

We had a little bit of a scare on Saturday as my father fainted and was taken to the hospital with very low blood pressure. He had described stomach and back pain that worried them into thinking it was internal hemorrhaging. However, after an overnight stay and an extensive battery of tests, apparently his cardiovascular system looks healthy, so perhaps it was an overdose of one of his medications coupled with some indigestion. He's back home and as chipper as ever.

Earlier that same day, I had a weird episode of being strangely overstimulated, awake and fully alert and yet I felt a bit faint and everything seemed sort of dreamlike due to the excessive details of it. I wonder if perhaps these chips I tried contain a bit of methamphetamines? Perhaps it was due to being exposed to the sudden cold snap in our area? Or perhaps I was having some kind of low-level panic attack about a social event I ended up canceling? I have no idea, I'm just spinning theories.

Barring any further unusual events, I plan to spend most of this week in development. Despite having ample distractions, the game developer bug has rooted itself well into the psyche, and it seems that life during my time off doesn't have quite as much meaning unless I'm producing something.

I've done a bit of GUI work towards the idea that my "Terran" players actually land on a planet in a dropship and deploy various colonists to perform their tasks. After the player has harvested enough materials, they take off again, perform trading and equipment upgrades, and then choose somewhere else to land. There's several different systems building opportunities:

1. When you land, you're essentially building a colony and basecamp, making the land more valuable.
2. Your colonists gain skills from performing tasks, making them more valuable.
3. Your dropship and vehicles can be customized to be more capable/valuable.

Of course, the devil is in the details, and I've been driving myself nuts trying to decide if this really is the right direction to go. Maybe I should knock that off and just forge ahead, then recode as needed.

I don't think this game is really My Own Net Dream, so to speak, but it is close enough to being done and fairly novel that I hate to just leave it where it is, so I'll continue to work on it.