Week 27 Update

Took a break from fixing bugs in the voxel engine to work on the interstellar trade system. I'll be back to working on the voxel engine again soon because the next pre-alpha release depends on it.

Build & Deployment:

Development:

• Updated interstellar trade to use ECS; wrote components for Star System profiles & Interstellar Economic profiles, and refactored the Trade Network framework to separate concerns for search from render/display.
• Finished updating & refactoring trade network code. Working on rendering & display before the next stage of trade network development.

Design:

• Spent a fair bit of time updating the design docs with Character Class information. Located some class designs I thought I had lost & forgotten about, including my "Divine Clown" class design. I still have work to do, there are a LOT of updates to do since I revised the skill & armor systems. Shared an excerpt from the class table on Twitter.
• Advanced some design work on religion & beliefs to coincide with some updates on character classes.
• Revised weapon designs for simple melee & missile weapons (swords, spears, flails, slings, bows, etc). There is no current plan to include "exotic" weapons, however advanced versions of simple weapons are forthcoming (i.e. magic & "powered" weapons).
• Revised firearm designs to include standardized builds, mods, & ammunition. Firearm "classes" include: Handgun, Needler, Carbine, Shotgun, Managun (Caster, Evoker, Summoner), Rifle, Minigun, Railgun, Grenadier. Energy weapons will be forthcoming.
• Class & Skill updates will be forthcoming once weapon designs are formalized. 

Influence:

• Played some Civilization 6 to check out the patches/updates from the last few years. There are a number of things improved from launch but in my opinion, the game is still tedious and bloated. 
  • A typical game session shouldn't take 4+ hours. It isn't like a role-playing game where you develop a character throughout a campaign. When you achieve a victory condition, the game is "over" and there is no lasting sense of accomplishment. It's too long for a solid strategy board game game (i.e. Chess, Pandemic, Risk, etc that can be completed in <2 hours).
  • Civ6 has cool ideas but they're lost in the noise. The franchise needs to "trim the fat" and get down to a straightforward game experience, something that takes maybe 2 hours tops, comparable to Slipways (2023).
    
  • I like the "barbarians" update that makes tribes develop into city-states.
  • After more than 2 days, I still haven't finished my science victory as Gilgamesh and I've decided to go for a conquest victory instead. I have less than 100 turns before a "score" victory is called. Lordy, this game takes way too long to play. How many times did I just hit "skip turn" while waiting for stuff to build. I miss Alpha Centauri.
• Played some ENDLESS Legend and while I like many of its designs, I can't say that I had fun playing it. I might need to give this title some more time before I decide whether I like it or not. Shrug.
• Did some research on Dead By Daylight. I've never played this game before but it sounds dope. I love the idea of asymmetric games (after all, I played Dungeons & Dragons for 15+ years), and there are some cool novelties in the slasher-vs-survivors game formula.

Marketing: 

• Only picked up about 10 new followers on Twitter. *Melon Tusk* continues to destroy my marketing platform.