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

Recap

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.

Results

Other than expanding the sprint over two months, I'd mostly call it a success. In addition to the map and event work I got a lot of other work done. First, pictures:

The changes here are pretty minimal. There's a additional button 'Navigation' for accessing the strategy map. You may also notice the 'Launch Mission' button is disabled. This is part of the inclusion of actual tactical missions to the game. At the moment the starting location on the strategy map has no missions, so there's nothing to launch first first starting in strategy at the moment.

Here's the screen that comes up when clicking on 'Navigation'. I'm still having some difficulty with the line drawing, so instead I opt-ed for color coding. Blue is where the player is, green is where the player can travel to. The tool-tip that comes up for each system indicates a name for each system as well as how many days it takes to travel there. The other thing that is new here is all the UI elements that aren't part of the 'Navigation' screen are inaccessible in a new way. Previously, I was just disabling all the buttons, which was getting more and more annoying to do. It was also getting more problematic for the main hud to create and position the screen widget. So instead, I've gone the route of making all the screen widgets basically full screen. Most of the screen becomes a widget that acts as a fader over everything behind the screen as well as eating up all the input events not used by the active screen.

Here's the 'Navigation' screen after having moved to a new system. The two red dots indicate the missions that are available in the system. For now I'm generating a random number of missions (3 at the most) when entering the system if there aren't any missions already in the system. The two other things that have changed are that the 'Launch Mission' button is now enabled (since there are available missions) and the date has changed (at the bottom left of the hud).

Here's the 'Launch Mission' button opens up the 'Tactical Deployment' screen (renamed). I've also added another drop down for selecting which of the available missions the ships should be sent to.

I managed to get the custom blueprint nodes working for my event system. The current implementation isn't ideal, but it's at least in a place where it's reasonably functional and I can improve upon it in the future.

A lot of other things went in as well that didn't have any direct visual representation.

• Address quite a few technical debt issues like (inappropriately) mutable class members, replacing an interface with a component (because it had member variables) and updates to class names that had were still old placeholders
• Finally added a failure condition to tactical so that if the player loses all their ships, they fail
• More blueprint integration of systems that I want available for gameplay scripting that will handle the success conditions for the mission
• Hooked up a mechanism for tactical map generation scripts and moved the temporary code I had so that it was being run through that system
• Source organization pass, breaking up code into more appropriate individual files
• General commenting pass in places I hadn't been very good about documenting
• Installed updates to my install of Visual Studio Community and update my Unreal settings to finally generate 2019 project files

January Goals

My main goal is to put in place the groundwork for the gameplay scripting I'll need for making the missions have the individual gameplay experiences that will make them more interesting to continually play over and over. I'm definitely more comfortable in C++ than Blueprint, but I also recognize that C++ isn't really the right tool/language for working on that.

I've also been noodling around with how I'd like for my tech-tree/research angle to work. I don't want something quite as straight forward as the Civ or XCom tech progression. But I was a big fan of the randomized future era added to Civ VI in the most recent expansion and the randomized breakthrough research options we added to XCom 2 in War of the Chosen. There were also some interesting ideas I really liked in Master of Orion 2 and Civilization: Beyond Earth. In the non-game space I've always been a fan of the work of James Burke, and two of his TV series Connections and The Day the Universe Changed. So there's a design that I'd like to get down on paper (so to speak).

If any readers have a suggestions for interesting tech trees in games that they liked I'd love to hear about them.

Games I'm Playing

Fate Grand/Order

Outer Worlds - Finished. It was pretty great but the ending had some balance problems.