Hope all of you had a merry Christmas and that your year has started well.

As you may have noticed, I have hardly been idle. I spent a little time this January porting Imperium Mini over to the Android just for the heck of it. It went very smoothly and easily; the benefit of working with Java. I doubt there is much of a market on there for strategy games more complex than Risk, though; so it’s not likely to make me rich any time soon. Nevertheless, it’s the type of game I wish there were more of on phones (and I was bored at the time), so…

Despite getting sidetracked on that, I did work a lot on Imperium throughout the past two months. I completed the basic game version, but ran into a few bugs along the way (now mostly solved). Work right now is focused on figuring out how to make the AI work well, as I am not very happy with it right now; it is too passive. It was while I was working (on paper) with ideas for how to solve this issue that I did the Android porting.

I’ll be having some time to think through such issues over the next couple of months, as I’m off on maternity leave until April. This also means that I am likely to be less active online for a while; so if you don’t see any updates on progress before May, that will be the reason.

Here be Dragons. Or in other words: November was the month in which I spent far too much time playing Dragon Age: Origins. That’s the problem of working on stuff in one’s free time; it really doesn’t leave space for much else, so playing games for me is always a question of sacrificing work time on Imperium. In theory, that leaves me rested and refreshed when I renew work on Imperium. In practice, it often takes a while before I get properly back in the rhythm of working, but I’m getting there.

I did pretty much complete the work on the siege engine (or at least I hope so) before the break, and am now working on the AI for the operational game. My plan is to add in the operational features one at a time in a completed state for the next couple of months, while trying to slowly expand the AI to match with the new functionality. So the first version that I hope to have ready by the end of this month, should be a functional and playable version of the game – with just the movement and battle orders available. I’ll then be adding the mobilization orders, patrols, administration, construction, as well as the rest of the orders that make up the full game. We shall see how this goes when we enter the new year.

Once more into the breach, dear friends. Well, that’s pretty much the story of October’s development work. Although I’ve also done other stuff, most of the month has been spent polishing the siege battle engine in Imperium; digging for bugs, fixing interface issues, adding a few extra options that felt like they were needed, and so on. It’s still a quite basic game engine where you choose to either reduce the walls, ravage the surrounding lands, blockade and/or assault (as defender you get to choose between staying put, offering battle or launching a sortie), but I think that there are decisions enough to make it interesting. The one new feature I added was to allow the player a choice of siege methods: rams (standard approach), circumvalliation (tightens the blockade and increases the difficulty of breaking the siege), siege towers (adds support for an assault) or mining (difficult, but effective). I expect to complete work on this latter today.

I also released the series of bug fixes I had done in Imperium Mini for a new and (IMO) improved version. I’m particularly pleased to have gotten the tooltips fixed; that problem had bugged me for a few months. Being able to isolate and fix small problems like that is one of the key reasons why I developed mini in the first place. Thanks to all of you who have helped by reporting issues in the game.

The current version will probably stay the way it is for a while, unless some major issues crop up. For a future release, I would like to experiment with changing the combat system, e.g., by allowing battles between stacks of units (with a simple Warlords-like battle engine), more units, leaders, and limiting the number of attacks in a turn per empire. Perhaps even opening the game up to let the player play with more empires. However… work on Imperium has first priority, so all this is speculation for the future.

In the meantime, you guys do know about Zak’s Hoplites, right? If you’re at all into the ancient period, you really should try it.

I am glad to see that some of you have enjoyed “Imperium Mini”. It is interesting – and a little bit scary – to release something like that into the wild. Even though I only mentioned it a few places (a couple of forums and of course in the mail I sent to the people on these forums), it is interesting to see how quickly one loses control of how information is spread on the internet. I thought I had made it very clear that the game was an early development version, but it wasn’t long before I noticed a couple of comments from people who simply failed to understand that. This release has surprised me in more than one way.

I hope most of you have noticed by now that there is a new version (0.1.1) available. I’ve actually fixed a couple of more issues since then, but since it is strictly minor stuff, I’ll wait until I have some time to do a more featureful update (or there is a need to fix some more significant bugs). I have a fair number of ideas for features that I’d like to add/fix, but they’ll have to wait until I find time between work, taking care of junior, and working on Imperium. If you have any wishes or ideas you’d like to see, feel free to post on the forums.

The Imperium project itself: well, it is progressing, as always. This past two weeks I’ve been working with the siege engine and its GUI, as well as more work on the general AI. For now, all the work is concerned with polishing these elements and working out the remaining kinks in the game engine. The target at the moment is to get the basic game playable by the end of the year – in fact, as soon as possible.