Just a short note to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

My development system outage last month really screwed up with plans. To my (sometime) amusement, first the power supply of my PC went AWOL. When I got that replaced (took a week since it was still on warranty), I then found out that my graphics card was entirely shot. So that went back to the producer (under warranty too), and since I did not want to waste any more time, I immediately purchased a replacement. Unfortunately, this brand new graphics card was itself defective… Finally, after a good deal more back and forth and lots of work on my PC and yet another new graphics card, I finally got everything working again.

The bottom line was that development stood still for about two weeks, which means I am that far behind my planned schedule. It did give me time to do some design work on a new project I would like to do (more on that when I have something to show), but everything else (i.e. Imperium) is thus pushed ahead in time.

Before I turn development effort to other things for a while, though, I intend to complete the Port Attack feature in Pirates and Traders. I am also looking to release a “Gold” version of Pirates and Traders. Currently, I intend it to be the same as the free game, but without ads and with a larger choice of starting ships for those who want a challenge (e.g., try starting with a pinnace). If you have anything that you wish could be included in a gold version (that does not hugely affect game balance), let me know. And lest I forget – thanks everyone for helping the game become such a success as it has been (passed 100,000 downloads about a month ago). I hope that I can continue to make the game worthy of its fans.

Well, that was unexpected. This weekend, the power supply unit of my development PC suddenly decided to die (well, I suspect the PSU – I’m still not 100% sure until I get a reply from the supplier). Fortunately the PSU is still under warranty, though the unfortunate side-effect is that I have to wait for the damaged unit to reach the supplier and a replacement to be sent to me, rather than simply going out to buy a new one.  This could easily take at least a week.

Which is crap – even though I take regular backups, they’re not easy to access from any of my other PCs (which run Linux). In addition to which, the last backup is a week old, so going to the effort of recovering the backed-up data is probably not worthwhile since I hope to have a replacement PSU before I would have redone the “lost” work.

Fortunately I can still do some work; I’ve got a bunch of quests for Pirates and Traders that need writing, and I actually have a completely up to date copy of Imperium available, so I’m also doing work on that. Which is nice – I haven’t really had time to do as much on this as I would like to as P&T has dominated the past couple of weeks.

Currently the plan is for a couple of big iterations on Pirates and Traders this month in order to add the main missing features, followed by a pause on major development (I’ll still be adding quests and doing smaller bug fixes) while I evaluate what to do next. In that period, I will be focusing my development effort on Imperium, and hopefully will be able to advance that to a point where I know where that project should go.

Thanks for reading – and thanks for playing.

Still struggling to find time to keep the blog updated, as you have no doubt noticed. Well, such is life sometimes.

Work on Imperium has been very scarce for a period. The main reason is that Pirates and Traders has been occupying most of my development time. When you have around 75,000 users downloading a game, you get a fair amount of e-mails, comments, and feedback; I try to respond to everyone. It’s also not a “complete” game yet, in the sense that I’ve added everything to the game experience that I originally envisioned; I still haven’t implemented Crew members, Port attacks, or any of the major adventure storylines that I have planned for the game. Add in all the excellent ideas that have been proposed by the active players (both on the forums and in mails), and I probably have work in this game for at least another six months – if not more.

I would be lying if I said that I haven’t considered simply dropping the Imperium project over the past few months. However, I have done so many endless iterations over the basic ideas, that I am loath to not do something with it. I still think the world lacks a good Ancient strategy game, and while the concepts I am working with now are much simpler and more streamlined than my original vision for the game, I still like the ideas and the design and think they are worth playing. Thus I still plan to try and split my development time between my mobile and desktop projects for a while yet, and see where I stand at the end of the year.

So many games to create – so little time to create them in.

The past months have been very busy ones – taking care of a toddler eats up time. It also makes it hard to get in the kind of concentrated periods of work that I thrive on, and work on Imperium has suffered as a result. Not being the type who is able to run on idle, I have instead focused my efforts on work that is a better fit to the reality of the work conditions I currently face, where I can do work for an half-hour here and there, as well as being able to run tests in the oddest of circumstances. In short – developing for my Android phone. This has resulted in two games so far – A Brief History of Rome (a port of the Java stuff I released last year) and Pirates & Traders.

A Brief History of Rome is pretty much done (though I still have some improvements to the framework that I plan to incorporate), but Pirates & Traders is a concept that I intend to expand on further.

Where does that leave the Imperium project? Although the actual code work I’ve done has been less than I had hoped, I’ve actually done a lot of work evaluating and working on the core game mechanics, trying to figure ways to streamline the design even further. In some ways, I am actually more optimistic about the game than I’ve been for a long time. Finding time to work on it is a problem, but I remain committed to getting it done in some form. I am hoping that I’ll be better able to structure my time (and thus be able to work on Imperium more consistently) once the little one enters daycare after the summer.

I will also try to return to regular monthly updates from now on. Until next time, have a great summer.