It's been a while since the last progress report. But there's been plenty of stuff happening and you'll notice now that the site is actually hosted on it's own (final?) domain and I've re-written the whole site so that it's now an App Engine app itself. Custom blog and all (really basic for now of course... eventually I'd like to build a forum or something for player to get together and discuss the game as well, but we'll see how that goes).

Anyhoo, the first screenshot I've got for today is the starfield view. It's not all that much changed from last time:

A couple of points to note here:

1. I've changed the sizing once more, it's now much more "zoomed in". I'm still not sure it's quite right (I think I went a little too far in that direction and might scale it back again)
2. The planet list on the left shows all of the planets around the currently-selected star. Soon it will also show all your ships at that star too. There's more detail that should be going here as well, but that's it for now.
3. Where it says "Welcome to War Worlds" is the chat window. If you tap the button, it brings up the full chat window where you can interact with other players. Chat is actually working in the game, but obviously I've got nobody to chat with yet...
4. The lower-right image is an AdMob placeholder for an ad. I'm thinking the game will be ad-supported mainly, but I haven't fully worked out the mechanics of monetization yet. Ads are easy, though.

Tap on a planet in the right-hand list and you get taken to the solar system view:

Here you can see this star has one "Inferno" planet and four "Terran" planets. I've tweaked the universe-generation algorithm now so that it favours Terran planets more and also to more realisticly place the other kinds of planets (for example, Inferno planets tends to go close to the star, Gas Giants futher away, etc)

Other points to note here:

1. The chat window is missing, that's an oversight on my part: the bottom section of the screen should always have the chat window and the ad.
2. The "Congeniality" of the planet has three dimensions that you can see here. Population, Farming and Mining. There describe how "congenial" the planet is to that kind of resource. I've tried to generate values in a way that seems "natural" for example, Terran planets are generally congenial to Population and Farming, while Inferno planets are congenial to Mining and "ill-suited" to Population.
3. Under the planet's Congeniality meters is details about your colony. There's a couple of "TODOs" there, but basically the progress bars show the relative focus of your colony (i.e. you can focus on growing your population, on farming, mining or construction). In the selected colony, you can see I've got a large focus on population, and equal focus between farming and construction.
4. In the solar system view itself, you can see the little "flag" icon which shows where you've got a colony. In this case, I've got a colony on the inferno planet and one on the selected Terran planet.
5. In the top-right of the view, you can see the current amount of minerals and food. You obviously get minerals by mining and food by farming. You need food to support your population and minerals to build things (more on this in a second).

If you tap the "Focus" button, you can adjust the sliders which control your colony's focus:

It's a little hard to explain, but basically "focus" is a number from 0.0 to 1.0 for each of the four areas. The four areas need to add up to 1.0 and the focus represents the percentage of your population that is "focussed" on the particular area. As you adjust the focus on one area, the other sliders automatically adjust to ensure it all adds up to 1.0.

Back on the solar system view, if you tap the "Build" button, you see:

The build menu. The first tab lets you build buildings on your colony, as well as upgrade existing buildings. This is pretty basic for now, but you can see here I've already built a Research Laboratory, Shipyard and Silo. For now, they don't actually do anything, but eventually the buildings will give your colony extra abilities and whatnot (for example, the ability to build ships, store extra food, increase your production, etc).

By the way, the images here are taken from the FreeOrion project. Artwork from the FreeOrion project is licensed with the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0, so I think it's OK for me to be using them. I'm planning to come up with my own artwork before the game is released anyway, this is just placeholder stuff.

The second tab is the "Ships" tab, which is similar to the Buildings tab, but lets you build ships. When you tap a building or ship, you are presented with this view:

Here you can see a brief description of what you're going to build, an approximation of how long it will take (each building/ship has an "intrinsic" build time based on the "complexity" of the building, but also your colony's Construction focus and the amount of minerals you have available affect build time as well).

Tap on "Build" and the item gets added to your build queue, which is the third tab of the "Build" window:

Here you can see I have a "Scout" ship queued up, it's 8% complete and will take another 3 minutes to complete.

And that's pretty much the state of the game as of this moment. There's a long way to go yet, but hopefully you can see the beginnings of the game finally taking shape!