I’ve apologised before about the recent lack of screenshots, and I’m afraid that I’m going to have to do it again.  All I can say is that I’ve been pulling together the secret third game mode, which requires learning to code a bunch of new things which I’ve never done before.  And every day, this side of the project is getting more exciting for me.

I mentioned about a week ago that I’ve been pulling apart some of the older code in the MMORPG Tycoon codebase;  things like class definitions and monster types, which previously stored their data together with their UI handling code.  Well, I’ve now mostly finished that process.  All the big difficult stuff has been thoroughly extricated from the UI code, which makes it much easier to reimplement the game’s UI without breaking the game simulation.  This means that as soon as I start posting screenshots again, you’ll stop seeing those ugly old black UI windows!

In other news, I’ve been experimenting with some new task tracking software, to help keep myself on track.  Folks might remember my brief usage of Mantis while developing Mantis version 1.1, but I was never really happy with it;  it was just too fiddly for my tastes.  The past two weeks, I’ve been using FogBugz, which is fantastic;  simple but powerful, and while it was clearly designed with people working regular 9-to-5 jobs in mind, it’ll happily cope with my currently somewhat eccentric work schedule.  And via FogCreek’s “Students and Startups” program, it’s freely available to students or organisations of just one or two people.  Anybody else out there working by themselves on a large project, it’s totally worth looking into!

Finally, I’ve been slowly working my way through another “Game Design” post which is secretly about some of my anxieties around MMORPG Tycoon’s game design.  Expect to see that soon.