So I got back from my vacation on Saturday. It was a good time, but I wish last year when I told my parents I'd be okay with going at this time I had realized exactly what this time of year entails. The pre-GDC period of Dec-Mar is always hectic for me, mainly with IGF interviews but also just general conference planning with the rest of the staff and laying out schedules and whatnot for myself and others. Now on top of that I have a game to complete (to a point) in order to show it to a potential publisher/distributor at GDC and I have this new GI project that I also have to get off the ground and running by GDC so that I can spend time there pushing it to developers. So I have one whammy of a freakin deadline in just over two months!

So while I was away I didn't get as much work done on GC as I wanted to. Yea big surprise you may think, being that I was on "vacation", but really it was because of a semi-major flaw I overlooked in my original design that sorta got me down for a bit. When I created the maps for the game I made them have 4 layers: Layer one just held a single tile that stored the map properties data. Layer two was the layer that held the shaded squares for the Imperialism games. Layer three held all the player peices and special system tiles. Layer four was an overlay layer used by editor to show brush shapes and the game to flash over a tile where the AI placed a peice during play. HOWEVER I realized last week, much to my dismay, that space dust and nebula tiles have to have player peices appear over them. This means I need to add another layer to the map. It also means that when placing peices I have to query two seperate layers instead of just one. It's not a really really big deal, but I was a bit bummed about it because I had already coded a lot for that single layer and now I have to go back a redesign some aspects of the game code. So instead I just put that off till I got back home and spent the rest of the time documenting the code and tidying it up.

So in short, no new pretty pictures to show off. But I'll have some soon, hopefully by the end of the week. I just need to work out how I'm going to balance GDNet, GI and BES evenly from now until GDC and get everything done, but I'll do it.

So I guess that's all for now. Be back with updates as they are warranted. I still wanna flap my lip about the goings on at GI but not yet. Soon... very soon... [smile]

Later.