I should probably make development my main free-time activity, game development is oft more satisfying than gaming for me these days - to the point where I eschew development late at night because it overstimulates me and makes it difficult to sleep. This is all I really have to do right now outside of looking for work and maintaining the household.
Now, as I turn my mind back to this epic space game idea I've had percolating for awhile, the gravity of such has me somewhat gripped by indecision. There's just so many ways to go about it...
- Role-playing game where you control a single character going around performing quests - largely where the idea of walking up and controlling ships via consoles due to immersion comes in. (Fairly standard BYOND formula.)
- Role-playing game with strategic tones where you control several characters performing quests. (Sentinel Worlds style.)
- Somewhat strategic game where you're completely disconnected from individual characters but undergoing a somewhat squad-based combat focus. (X-Com or Gold Guardians style.)
- Extremely disconnected economic game where you're mostly focused on resource and commodity acquisition (4X Game or EVE Online style.)
- All or some of the above as appropriate to realize the overall design.
As a fellow who enjoys dwelling on things so much, therein lay the problem with my progress at the moment. I'm having a hard time deciding what to sink my time and effort into, and consequently I sink my time and effort into dwelling on this.
I have, at least, improved my programming practice a bit, at least as pertains to leveraging the BYOND platform. I used to utilize several layers of objects to bridge the gap between skin and verb, but now I think I've devised a relatively good way to fuse skin control and verb utilizing the call function. (I have a fairly complex interface as I prefer to see commands cached due to concerns over latency fairness, and this requires the necessity of transcending the usual verb interfaces.) It basically goes something like this:
mob
verb/thisIsMyVerb()
// blah, standard verb stuff
GetVerbIcon(var verbName)
switch (verbName)
if (verb/mob/thisIsMyVerb)
// return the appropriate icon
..(verbName) // This is important because I'm basically going through the entire atom heirarchy to see if an icon can be found
In other words, I'm basically trying to work around the idea that verbs can't have icons, but at times functions related to verbs may need to show up on a skin panel. This simple workaround attempts to bring verb and thing-visible-on-skin-panel a whole lot closer than what I have been doing, which is having special objects with the verb functionality on them and then other objects referring to these objects. That is what you call mindless busywork.