Personal Update:
It looks like I won the Week of Awesome III [size=1]unofficial judging award! >.>

I had a lot of fun playing all the entries and participating at least peripherally in WoA III. Congratulations to the winners, kudos to all the participants, and special thanks to all the contributors who made up quite the prize pool this year. I'm not sure when I'll get time to make my belated entry, but I'll let you know when I do.

Professional Update:

I made a few pages for my website at ecktechgamescom. One for each Unity Asset that I've submitted and an About page. I spent more time than I intended on styling and layout, but I think it looks nice now.

I've been messing with my turn-based battle system and I've added ship movement to the mix. Each ship has a limited amount of movement and spends this time to turn and move. Currently there aren't shield arcs or firing arcs so movement doesn't mean too much yet. The AI just picks a random spot near the player to move to, but it looks more interesting than sitting still and trading licks. I should have recorded a video with slower turning ships so you could see the ghost indicator's range shorten up as you try to move behind yourself.



I stumbled across another sci-fi turn-based game Stars in Shadow and saw how their combat is HEAVILY influenced by Master of Orion 2, and that's when it dawned on me. MOO2 combat is really what I'd love to have in my game, so I'll be trying to emulate that as best I can.

There's a ton of stuff to do, so I'm going to start fleshing out my design a little more and start knocking things out. Here are a few off the top of my head:

• BattleSystem improvements
  
• Better Ship Blueprints/Configuration system
  
• Ship components - Engines, power generators, armor, shields, etc
  
• Weapon Mods
  
• Multiple Combatants and Initiative Queue
  
• More Weapon Types
  
• Shields / Shield Arcs
  
• Firing Arcs
  
• AI that's at least somewhat interesting
  
• Unit/Target Selection Indicator
  
• Better UI System
  
• Crew/Internal damage
  
  My main efforts are going to be these items for the next week or two. It's not that I'll be done in 2 weeks, I just want to move on to some different game elements once the combat is good enough to be a placeholder.
  
  

  Tip from your Uncle Eck:

  
  I didn't really run into anything weird or gotcha-worthy in Unity this week, so I'll just share some Eck wisdom. Here's the secret to losing weight:
  [spoiler]Eat less, move around more.[/spoiler]