Another year and it's definitely been a weird one. Since the last blog birthday post here it's been Covid lockdown basically the entire time. It's eased up some in the past few months but not like the before times. At least I have an appointment for a vaccine shot tomorrow. The last couple months e…

Let's just dive right into all the details of this update, shall we!

• Missiles Design
• Separate out some code to a new plugin
• Begin Work on Squadrons
  • New equipment system needed

The sprint went okay. The way I layout my goals for you, dear reader, and the way I plan them out in my project mana…

And so we begin 2021. So far it still feels a lot like 2020.

• A gameplay design for Fighter Squadrons
• A gameplay design for missile weapons
• Additional support for Persistent Effects
• More asset validation tools/features
• Technical and other Debt items

I don't feel like I did very well this last …

Happy New Years! I hope everyone has had good holidays and perhaps some nice time off. I've been on vacation for two weeks already with another week to go! I'd probably have gone a little crazy with a project like this to work on.

• Implement status effects
• Upgrade to Unreal Engine version 4.26
• Upg…

Well we're into the home stretch of the year now. Thanksgiving (at least for us in the U.S) is behind and the various December holidays in front of us. I've got a tree and lights up with a little more decorating to come. This'll be the first year I haven't gone home for a winter holiday so that's g…

Hope everyone had a fine Halloween and is looking forward to Thanksgiving (at least for those in the US).

• A refactor of the time tracking gameplay
• A custom event node that would auto-register for events
• Build out the framework for the research/tech tree gameplay

Overall I got everything done and a…

Overall a pretty good month. Although I was hoping to be a little more productive, I got what I was hoping to accomplish completed so there's that.

My goals for September were:

• An implementation for the Ship configuration UI
• Support for dialog boxes
• Refactor of the project queue

And two secondary t…

It feels like it's been a lot longer than a month since I last wrote one of these! Working from home has dragged into it's 6th month now for me. Maybe it's that, maybe it's looking back over the list of things I did and it appearing long. Spoiler Alert: It was pretty epic.

The things that I wan…

Well, summer's in full swing here in Maryland. I've managed to keep myself quite busy with my project making some very good progress. The overall length of this update can probably be seen as proportional to how engaged I was with the work I put in this month.

The goals for July were as follows…

Time to get back on schedule with these updates even though it's only been a couple weeks since the last one.

I wanted to finish up the work that I had planned to complete in May but was unable to either due to my own distractions (Civ 6) or personal issues (back problems). Ultimately this mean…

I'm a little behind on my update this month (which I'm guessing only really matters to me).

For May I wanted:

• Add some strategic consequences to tactical damage
• Create a loot table that can be used to for various reward systems like missions
• Address a few technical debt issues

Is it finally May? I feel like it's been two or three months since I wrote one of these.

Visualization support.

Replace the forced/group movement with a visualization blueprint instead of a native one.

I would probably rate this sprint's results as: Fantastic. All the tasks t…

Wow, I've been doing this blog for my project now for basically a year. I think the monthly “sprints” and blog posts have worked out a lot better than trying to do weekly post like I had originally tried with my custom engine project. This project has definitely helped me learn a …

I had a few goals for February: Objectives, a new mission script and a custom K2 node for map iteration.

I would rate the month as mixed.

The map for-each node went together pretty smoothly. Started by working on a native version of the array for each loop macro Epic provides as part of U…

I wanted to finish laying the ground work for the mission scripting/blueprints that will be used to differentiate the tactical mission gameplay.

Everything here went alright.  It's going to be an on-going process of exposing functionality to blueprint as it comes up, but I believe t…

Due to the timing of holidays and vacations and trips it seemed better to just roll December into the same "sprint" as November.

I wanted to finish up the integration of the strategy map into the game and work on the blueprint integration of my custom event handler.

Other than expanding t…

For October I wanted to get a strategy map up and running.

It was kind of a good news/bad news sort of month. I did get the strategy map generation hooked up, though not much thought has gone into what it's generating so it's not really an interesting map but that can c…

For September I wanted to 1) hook up my UI to make actual state changes in the game and 2) add a UI for active projects.

I'd say things went great! I actually got the UI hooked up relatively quickly and was able to take a lot of time for the projects. I even got a littl…

For August I wanted to finish up with transactions, building a UI that could execute the system I built in July.

Again I did okay. With a little tip from one of the UI engineers at work I was able to get my widgets working for a UI that can display and trigger a transac…

Slow, but steady seems to be the name of the game.

In July I wanted to finish up with my transaction system.

I did okay. I was hoping to at least get started on the UI side of things but just didn't have the time. I did finish all the initial gameplay elements that …

Welcome back! So my June "sprint" (I guess that's what we'll call these) went pretty well goal wise. I may have under-shot for the month, but it's tough when you can't be exactly sure how much time you will have devote to your project.

My main goals for June were to be able to sele…

Hello again! Let's keep this train rolling, though I don't have anything to fancy to discuss. The month was pretty mixed with some travel, some busy weekends, and some time when my girlfriend out of town.

If you recall from the April Update, my next goal was the basis of a strateg…

My friend @slayemin made a good suggestion after my last journal post which was to be sure to post on a regular schedule. Seems obvious, but sometimes someone's got to say the obvious thing. I'm hoping to keep on a monthly schedule at this point, I even planned to have …

So, it looks like it's been a little over two years since the last time that I updated this blog. It doesn't feel that long ago, but the calendar tells no lies. I think I'll start with some general updates on what I have been up to since my last post. Or maybe it could be called my list of excus…

Combat

In my last entry I mentioned the few things that were really remaining for my tactical gameplay. I spent the time since working on the weapons issue. I added a few more weapons definition entries and updated the ship definitions to be the owner of the weapon slots. Those slots define limit…

Over the last few weeks I've made some good incremental progress on the combat in my little strategy game.

1) I added shields to both my starship class definition as well as to the starship data component. (We're in space so what fun is space combat without shields of some kind).

2) I added a new co…

January has not been particularly kind to me. It started with getting sick (you always seem to pickup a bug of some kind from planes) and after getting over that I had wisdom teeth extraction to look forward to and recover from. In fact, I'm currently writing this entry on the last day of my 4 day …

Howdy GameDev.net! Welcome to 2017!

It's been tough finding time over the last month, December is a tough month to carve out personal time. That's not to say I didn't get anything done, just not a whole lot in my hobby code. I was hoping to have some more time during my Christmas vacation but in…

I hope that everyone (at least in the US) had a good holiday. I took the week off from work and while I couldn't devote the entire time to working on my hobby code I was able to get a nice chunk of something done.

First I took some code that I had written for my component system and generalized it …

I'm back! I told you Sid Meier's Civilization was my Kryptonite and it basically stole my last two weekends playing it. The first weekend was no real surprise and I had planned to just play it all weekend. But I got sucked in again the following one while doing a few productive things like laund…