A good friend, Josh McCord, and I get together to code every Monday night.  It's been an on-going tradition now for a couple of years.  While I'd like to say we've made a lot of progress and released lots of code that would be misleading.  We've had aspirations of writing a MMORPG - in fact we made LOTS of headway towards that goal last year.  However, as many personal project go, the scope kept creeping up and expanding.  We tried to reign it in and have well-defined goals...alas, our efforts seemed in vain.  Eventually, we decided to put on hold all that we had been working on.  We have never intended to discard the code, mind you, but instead to leverage what we've done so far in new projects.  And we have been successful at bring forward the components that we developed for the MMORPG (such as a very cool networking infrastructure, as well as some general purpose utility classes and libraries) into our current game project.

We decided to tone back our efforts just a bit and write a multi-player computer game where the rules have already been defined for us.  We've had a tradition of playing Settlers of Catan for the last while and thoroughly enjoy the game so, why not?  We decided to create a computer version of the board game - especially after seeing what was already out and available on the Net.  Not to say anything particularly bad or negative about the already extant versions, but they sure need a lot of work.  Sure, the game mechanics are there, but presentation is a HUGE part of any would-be successful app and that seems to be an area in which they all suffer.

So far, we have the networking infrastructure (TCP/IP, sockets-based) already fully in place and implemented.  Additionally several game mechanics are operational along with about 80% of the graphics.  Today's focus was finalizing the Editor utility and getting real-time stats for in-game display.  The Editor utility allows us to generate graphically a Settlers of Catan scenario file (xml-based) that can be loaded into the game at runtime.  The tool is complete but for the actual 'save' process which I don't anticipate should be a big deal.  I have a feeling it will write itself.