I said I wasn't going to provide an update for October, as real life has absorbed me for a while, but as it turns out a few things have been making solid progress, so I figured I'd update you all on that anyway 😄
First and foremost, and the most important - work has started on the research tech area. JWTC has been working hard on the presentation aspect of this, ensuring that various tech arms can be displayed, selected, and provide various context-aware information for each node. In addition to this, some animations have been added to make this an awesome experience. This isn't far off being approved, and will then be wired up to the server-side to ensure that various options are enabled or disabled dependent upon your own empire's research and infrastructure state. Of course, research doesn't unlock until you've built your first Laboratory, so will be a screen you see once you've achieved that objective within your Empire.
This will be my main focus in November.
There's been a few bugs that were raised as part of the alpha testing that have been hard to resolve, namely: race conditions. This is when two competing interactions happen at around the same time, resulting in a weird user experience or incorrect game state logic. I've been able to tackle one of these, but the main one which happens on the client side has been difficult to reproduce and resolve. That said, it is reproducible, so it's just a matter of time before I resolve that and we can move on.
Lastly, I've spent some time back at the game design desk working through the Human faction's units, and starting to dial in the units of Eras 1 & 2 (up to colonisation). It's great to see this aspect start to come together, and am hoping that by end of year we begin to see these units in the game itself, but only time will tell.
That's it for this months' update.
Until next time, Travellers.