Personal Update:
I apologize for the delay in my weekly update. While the kiddo was spending the night at her grandmother's, she broke a glass which sliced her foot open. The cut was bad enough to need stitches, so we picked her up and took her to the emergency room. We were at the hospital for 4 hours!!! >.< We finally got home around 3:30 am. Blergh. She was a real trooper though. She complained about the wait and her non-injured foot falling asleep, but other than that she was calm and collected. I'm super proud of her.

Development Update:

My main project was getting a little cluttered with some hacky code so I decided to refactor my Overland Map code in a separate project. So I cleaned up my code and got a few things working. You can select a fleet or a planet with a left-click. You can move a ship to deep-space, a planet, or another fleet. And if you're clicking on a spot with several potential targets, it pops up a dynamic quick-selection box with the list of choices. Once you make the selection, it uses the delegate that I pass to finish up the operation I started.

The Overland Map is being populated with randomly colored planets, but you can't do anything meaningful with them yet.

I also decided to do the same thing with Sprites that I was doing with my Composite Primitive Models, but I'm not very pleased with the way things look. Sometimes a ship or the selection box is on a fractional coordinate and the sprites get distorted. I've looked up some articles on getting clean sprites in Unity, but it's a slightly complex task for some reason. If anyone has any quick tips or great articles on the subject, please post a comment below.

I'm much happier with how the code is looking and how the overland controls work now. And I have a couple of directions I can go for better looking sprites. I'm not going to worry too much about the look for now though. Next week, I'm going to focus more on the UI. Showing details about the active ship, its orders, selected planet, etc. I'd also like to start work on the trade system.

Confession time:
The last few weeks, I haven't put as many hours as I should have into game development. Last week I was hoping to put in extra time, but I don't think I even logged 30 hours. The whole point of me quitting my real job was so I could focus completely on game development. I could place the blame on several things, but no matter what the interruptions are, if at the end of the week I'm not putting in significant effort - then it's ALL MY FAULT.

I'm hoping this was just a temporary slump. I feel like I have a better direction now and I'm excited about my next few tasks at least. But if I don't pick up the pace in the next few weeks, I think I'll look for a real job instead of burning through my savings.

Tips from your uncle Eck:
If you see yourself being lazy, call yourself out on it and get back to work!

When you need to refactor a bunch of code, sometimes it's easier to do so in a clean project. Unnecessary dependencies are easily spotted as you port over only the code you need.