It's been a busy few days- productive, but busy!
Tomorrow I go back to the normal job, and back to writing down ideas and to-dos on a notepad on the side. So let's recap what got accomplished, what happened over the last few days, and where I'm going from here.

​In truth, my intensive game dev week started the evening of Wednesday the 25th. I logged off of my work laptop, put it to the side, and fired up my personal rig. 
I won't go over every bracket and semicolon, but here is a VERY high level of what I've gotten done since then:

• A bunch of framework stuff to get the game talking reliably to my server

• A bunch of other framework stuff to get the game to be able to join a Multiplayer session (the 'town')

• An unexpectedly little amount of work to get a player to be able to join a ship and get pulled to that ship's server instance

• The ability for the server to dynamically assign server instances to ships as players join and drop (I'm really pleased with this one)

• 3 different mini game high-functioning-prototypes, 2 of which might make it to a production version. 

• Mini-games can report back to the server for progress / updates

• A whole entire separate project to have an interactable 'world' program (SkyHaven) to make the game world feel alive

• A framework for reporting and communication between SkyHaven and Project Air Bags 

• Updated some art

All in all, I'm pretty pleased with that. I definitely got farther then anticipated and enjoyed almost all of it. 

So what's happened since the last post?

These 12 lines of code, or more specifically, the spot these 12 lines get called from, took me nearly 10 hours to figure out. To be clear, I knew what the lines of code should be, but it seems where they should go was the thorn in my side. Let me know if you want to hear a rant, but it's safe to say there are some pretty nastily worded comments where this function gets called as a reminder to myself. 

The next day, I had a realization:

So I set to work.
15 hours and 1 wiki-page of fictional ship names later, and I present to you...

SKY HAVEN

Right now the ships just move from port to port and periodically update their status to the server- but hey, you can click on them!

It may not look like much, but each of those colored dots is a separate ship, doing it's own ship thing. We have a fleet of merchants, pirates, and 3 different Navys.
But more importantly, this system will allow for world persistence, world-wide AI tweaks, and a whole host of other controls to be built on-top of it.
AND...
It can talk to Project Air Bags!

Finally, I went ahead and imported a draft of the ship that Chris has been working on, and I think it looks amazing!
That was a few hours ago- and it pretty much wraps up what's been going on as I finished out today.

Thanks for checking this out- please reach out if you have thoughts or questions!

You can download a video here (40MB)