https://imgur.com/gallery/day-30-unemployed-cane-jumpspace-7IHpjjn
Day 30 is here. That is, depending on how you count, a first full month. There’s one number missing from 1-30 as I was counting days so a skipped day got skipped, but more recently, if I skipped a day, the next day got the next number. So I have been doing this longer than a month, but I’m basically up to a month’s worth of days (almost, close enough). WOOT.
Definitely progress!
So, still unemployed and have this if you haven’t seen it: Looking for work
Small news of the day: Got a cane! Bad news of the day: I, uh, am N O T ready for the cane. Had my wife out recording so I could try it, and nope. Will keep working with it, but not steady to take a step with it yet.
But the big news of the day - I took a day “off” from job prep/search to work on a project I’ve wanted to do forever. Back in the 80s, there was a game that I know only as WARP.EXE since that was the name of the executable. You were presented with a grid. Planets represented by letters. Fighters produced on each planet each turn. You send fighters to conquer other planets.
I have a first-playable version up at http://ieh.im/ - it’s full of bugs, but it’s playable.
- To send fighters to another planet - click the send fighters button and do NOT click on the pop up (that triggers a bug for now) just type the source planet’s letter (i.e. A for your first planet), hit ENTER, then the destination planet, hit ENTER, then the number of fighters to send - “a” sends all available. It’ll tell you how many turns it’ll take. You can use the distance tool to know how long without sending fighters.
- When your fighters arrive, they will reinforce the planet if it’s already yours, or attack if it’s not. Messages about all of this will appear below the grid
- To end your turn, click the end turn button. Each turn is manually advanced this way.
- Strategy: To figure out the approximate production of each enemy planet, send 1 fighter on one turn and 1 fighter on the next turn. The difference in fighters between the two turns should give you the production per turn so you can plan how many to attack with
Known bug: My order of operations is off. You can conquer planets on the zeroth turn with one fighter (for those planets within range).
Plenty of other bugs which I will work on.
I also need to work on things like the travel time and how fights work. Travel will get longer/slower, and I will rewrite the combat system to let defenders attack in a full wave, then attackers attack in a full wave (or maybe keep it the way it is now after that first wave, which is that each attacking fighter has a certain chance to kill a defender or be killed, and so they attack until one side runs out - but the defenders need a numerical boost)
I also have some ideas - like making it so you can have a text box to enter something like “ab1ac1ad1” which would allow you to send one fighter from A to B, C, D, respectively, without clicking a bunch of times. Also grouping nearby planets so you can easily send all of the fighters from all of the group somewhere at once - because you’ll be spending a lot of time collecting fighters from a number of your planets to build a large enough force to take on some planets with high production that have been building up for a number of turns…
Also, production can go up or down by one every turn with a small chance and some mins/maxes.
My mom used to play this game all the time when I was growing up. I had sheets for a long time where she’d track the fighters she’d send out with the number of fighters on the target so she could track who she’d sent to and how many they had for the two times she’d send so she’s know the production…
There’s also a hidden planet, but it is not functional for now. But it’s there - the “period” planet. I just have a bug where you can’t send anything to it. Will fix.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy even in its current state, and even more as I fix bugs and add features. 