Learning and development are coming along nicely though with the holidays and other life events occurring my end of the month target is looking to be in doubt as I peer at it from the mid-way point.  Lately I’ve been working on the models for world, solar system, galaxy, and universe creation so that I don’t have to try to build all that content by hand.  As I’ve played with the ratios of stars and land masses it reminds me a bit of the games like MOO or GalCiv where you could pick how dense you wanted the galaxy to be.  The challenge I’m finding is not so much in the ratio of occupied vs. empty space, but in getting a good distribution so things are not all clumped up in a way where you have vast, huge, swaths of empty space.  While I’m puzzling over that model I’ve also been working on the presentation of the play area.  I think I’ve finally got something I like there but I also see that I need to add a mini-map to make navigation a little easier.  Right now navigation is done by touching a hex to drill down, or by swiping in a direction to move the map scene by 7 hexes along that path.  The challenge with the swiping now is you don’t know where you’re at in relation to… well anything.  Part of that is because I’m not displaying any text yet, but it’s also because there is no mini-map to offer the reference point.  Though now I’m trying to figure out how important fog of war is (as opposed to line of sight visibility).  I think since the concept is that the worlds were either terraformed or scouted ahead of time maps exist, you just don’t necessarily know what’s in a given hex until you go look.

Anyway, here’s a quick screen shot of what it looks like now, though I’m pretty sure it will change more over the next couple of weeks.