Ahoy there! It’s been a while, thanks for waiting around! The summer has been very busy with Nan and I participating in our first goat shows, as well as hosting an indie game developer mini-conference on Lake Powell.

But between all that, I’ve managed to get a ton of stuff overhauled for beta18! You can download it for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. (TestFlight for iOS will be mailed out shortly.)

So here’s the breakdown of what we’ve got! The most “in your face” change is the overhaul of the Galaxy Map. It now has a few constellations and each star has a slightly different game type with it. In theory, you can now play some 2v2 and donut shaped games!

Next up, the rankings got a major overhaul. I’ve only tested them a little bit, but now you should be able to rank up your flag, gain extra stars (by earning points on various stars), and get wings by winning in tournaments (right now: betting.) I reduced the number of ranking flags down to one flag for the whole game, as I think that makes things easier to understand, and it makes it so unlike previous Galcons where some flags were impossible to rank up, this one should be.

Next, I did some major work on the user interface stuff. For a long time I’ve disliked the pan + zoom features in Galcon 2, so Nan suggested I change it to a mini-map type thing. Which really changes how it works, but I think it works much better. Be sure to give Esparano’s Frustration mod a play with it and tell me what you think.

Lastly, I did even MORE work on the user interface. iOS players should be able to use multi-touch finally! I also got sick of the ludicrous number of options in the settings page. I wasn’t able to even be sure what some of the options meant after a while and it was beginning to break the UI code by having too many options. (It was possible to set up the game so it just plain didn’t work.) Anyway, I reset everyone’s settings and have a new set of them to mess with.

Thanks everyone for your feedback! Be sure to stop by the forums and tell me what you think of all the new stuff, I need your feedback to make this game the best it can be!

-Phil

P.S. Pop onto the servers right now, I’ll be playing for the next hourish and getting bug reports / feedback there too!

On Friday Nan and I loaded up our 4 does into our horse trailer and hauled them up to Pueblo for the Colorado State Fair dairy goat show. After paperwork got done at the fair we checked them into their pens and Nan went off and parked the trailer.

While she was gone, I got the exciting job of cleaning out several pens, which were filled with the previous occupants defilements. This was a pretty unpleasant experience, and fell into the category of things that if I told my 15 year old self I would end up doing, he would have informed me that I may have made some poor life-choices.

Once that was completed we had some ludicrously priced, but delicious fair food and headed home where we stayed up until 2am getting our costumes prepared for the goat fun costume event on Saturday. The morning came too soon and I spent most of Saturday in a bit of a stupor due to lack of sleep.

Even so, I had a good time showing our goat Lilly, and received a blue ribbon for being the only goat in her class.

Later in the day I showed Nubbin who went on to receive a Reserve Champion in the Jr Recorded Grade show! This is a pretty significant honor, Nan and I were quite surprised!

I took a few naps in the afternoon and felt much better in the evening, where we competed in the goat fun costume show! When I signed in, the girl asked me what age group, and I indicated adult. She said, “14-18?” and I said, no, 34. So she added an extra category to her page that said, “34” on top. I guess they don’t get too many geezers in their goat fun show.

The youth classes were full of great costumes. One of the best ones included a goat converted into a camel. Nan and I were proud of ours too, Nan dressed as “Victorista Cruz: World Traveller” and I dressed as “Eugene and my robot the P9000”

As the only entries in the “34” class we both received ribbons and a prize.

On Sunday the second part of the goat show ensued, we were much better rested, so it was about 10 tons more fun to be awake. There was no costume show, but we won the “Primier Exhibitor” award for having the most Registered Grade (experimental) goats in the show! This was pretty exciting to us, as we’re really trying to create some new goat mixes with particularly good dairy and pack goat attributes.

And, that was the state fair! We had fun! We might even be doing another goat show this coming weekend, but it’s right up next to the 360iDev conference I’m going to, and I’m not sure if I’d survive two huge events right after one-another. We’ll see!

-Phil