So, normally I tell myself "focus focus focus" and work on this game I'm making. But I'm starting to think I bit off more than I can chew. Which, from reading other people's blogs, is pretty normal.

This project is extremely ambitious, and I'm getting burnt out constantly. I keep getting ideas for other things. So I decided to let myself work on something that I think I can easily accomplish, as long as it works on a skillset I don't have...specifically working on art and events/delegates in C#. So, for the past two days, I created something I'm pretty proud of.

One of my favorite games as a kid was a game called "Alien Legacy." It was created in 1994 and it did not do well. It was very buggy and the UI is very obtuse. The mechanics of the game are hard to figure out, and don't always work the way you expect, specifically orbital mechancs. It's also very hard. It didn't do well.

But I absolutely love it. It's hard sci-fi, with your ship arriving in a new solar system with the crew waking from cold storage, finding out the earth was wiped out by our xenophobic neighbors.  You are all that is left of humanity. You have a sister ship that should have arrived in the solar system before you, but there's no contact. You begin colonizing the planets, discovering the fate of sister ship and running into all kinds of humanity ending threats.

You can build as many colonies as you want, explore the planets of the galaxy, limited by fuel capacity and time. You create robots and slowly bring people out of cold storage until you reach your max. If you don't do things fast enough, cold storage malfunctions and you lose half your crew.

It's really a great game if you can get past the bugs, and it's abandonware.

So what I wanted to do was replicate the base building side of the game.

Here is what we start with...a simple airport. We have 4 buildings to create. Storage isn't apart of Alien Legacy.

Clicking on any of the buttons on the bottom highlights areas that we can build...Alien Legacy uses a square grid, but I wanted to mess around with a hex grid.

As we build, the grid grows. I don't create the entire map, I create new hexes as we expand, which means we can build infinite games as long as things don't crash from overflow. Construction takes real time, and when they're done they will sprite swap to the regular sprite.

We can also bulldoze, and it will sprite swap back to the construction swap and then remove themselves back to the none sprite. 

And lastly, I have green floating text that spawns and fades out and rises everytime the inventories increment.

This only took me a handful of hours to make, and I love it. This base game I have here can go in so many directions. The inventory is correctly incrementing, I just, ya know, need to do stuff with it.

So I'm really happy to be able to use these skills, especially since everything is based on the observer pattern, where the data model for everything is separated from the display model. When the data model changes, it invokes an event, and everything subscribed to it will change.

So even though I'm not working directly on Fraud Simulator, I'm still expanding my skills and enjoying the art of game making.