Just back from my two week break after celebrating Christmas and the New Year.

I’ll be spending the next week sorting through work and arranging things for the year ahead. I have examinations (my final admitting exams) in August. Yep, even at 25 there’s no escaping them…:). So I expect to be spending most of the summer studying.

During the Spring I hope to get both Shadows Rising RPG and Quantum Star SE 3.0.0 up to Alpha status. QS has been neglected lately – I just haven’t the time online to do certain tasks and it’s not looking any pettier this side of December…:(. At least the new version will get a good start…

Shadows Rising still occupied most of my attention for January. QS fans may just wait their turn, harsh though it may be. I’ve also transferred a little of my writing time to a new RPG project called The Eternal Sun. It’s a startup RPG written in Python and C++. I’m focused this time more on the maintenance of website services and the storyline development than actual coding. I’ll wait until Summer before doing any C++ work or until the developers have a basic working server and client.

Back to SR. I got a lot of research and nagging details out of the way over the holiday. Not a lot of code to show for it but it’ll come. My reorganising should clear away a lot of clutter and let me finally focus on what matters. Main areas I intend finishing are the basic game structure – healing, combat and creature encounters. We already have merchants, locations and almost a working map system. I have a feeling the editors are not a huge success – but they work fine from my test server so I’ll release some default maps to ease to creative process.

There’s actually very little more needed for a playable pre-alpha – I just need to knuckle down and start coding!

QS is still hanging around. I’m going to abandon the official server idea – it’s not a prime priority given my limited time. Better it’s finished than hanging around like a starving beast. The website needs a major revamp – watch for this weekend. I need to get a base version for the pre-alpha finished – another bare knuckled coding session…:).

I should be a better position in about two weeks – with SR 0.0.6 and QS 3.0.0 pa1 ready for release. At that time I am going to put some pressure on further progress. I need some help on these projects or they’ll take a lot longer. Luckily SR has built up some momentum and there are a lot of advances in the pipeline that just need time and patience. QS is beginning to look like a summer project – I doubt I’ll have a lot of progress before then.

Winding up – expect SR to hit Alpha this spring, QS will follow during the Summer. Both should hopefully hit beta by late summer. This time next year there’ll be a fresh RPG and a thoroughly revamped space strategy doing the rounds! I wonder if my server will take it…:)