At least outside, what with the heatwave going on. It’s not often that I find myself defeated from development work by the weather, as has been the case a couple of days in the past month.
Well, as some of you have found out, I’ve started responding to e-mails and on the forums again. The backlog was insanely long – once again, my apologies to everyone who’s written me – but the inbox should now be at zero again. If you’ve written me expecting a response and haven’t heard from me, I’ve missed it – please ping me again. I probably won’t be responding to the reviews at the moment – possibly later, when I’ve gotten a few updates out, but in general I hope to once again try to respond on within a week. We’ll see how well that goes once work and school starts again, but I really want to avoid another backlog like the one I just got out from under.
Work proceeds with integrating the combat engine. As mentioned, I’m working toward simply releasing a first “rough” version before adding depth and layers to the simulation – which sound simple, but the conversion to combat units and back is tricky, and I’m always surprised by how many views and information needs to be coded for what (in my mind at least) is a simple feature. We’re getting closer and closer though – especially now that I’ve had some vacation from work, and am beginning to get back up to my usual work rate on MicaBytes stuff.
I can’t promise a new update this week – and the next update may not even have the combat engine activated (changes to savegame structure means I may release this in stages to minimize “big bang” issues) – but it’s getting very close now. In the next post, I’ll try to write something on the game mechanics that I finally settled on for the land combat system and how I ended up there, but in the meantime, here’s a recent sneak peak of a (doomed) pirate attack against a port city.
