February 7th, 2018 My goal this week was to recreate the account creation system so that as the game expands, I can easily add in new servers to help with the load balancing. I thought this was going to take a while, account creation had always been handled by the server application, meaning adding in new servers would essentially mean users would require a second account.  My first thought was the create a secondary “Lobby” server for simple account authentication and some basic stats recording. Instead, I opted to go a different route altogether.  I decided to write a few PHP pages that handled an HTTP request from the game itself which would then create the user into an authentication database.  When logging in, it would quickly send an HTTP response to the web-server that would return a response either it was a successful login or not. This was actually far easier than I had expected and I managed to get the majority of the functionality completed within one evening, with an energy drink, junk food and music by my side. What’s next on the chopping block?  Here’s my current development “road-map” (I use that term loosely) for the rest of this week. 1. Rewrite the chat system to record up to 100 last chat messages received and have the ability to scroll up and down through chat history. At the moment, it only keeps a record of the last 12 messages received with no way to scroll.  Since all of these elements are essentially rendered sprites on a layer, it is quite a bit of coding to complete but I think the pay-off will be worth it. 2. Add Chat Tabs - the ability to see #Game - For game messages such as Splats, Bounces, Wins, Losses, Announcements.  #General - for general communication with other players in the game, and #Clan for chatting amongst your clan. 3. Add Clan System - the ability to create and join clans, which will have their own ranking system, the ability to trade and share gear etc. 4. Team Deathmatches - Currently, we have Invaders (vs AI) and Elimination matches (free-for-all), the next format of game to add will be Team Deathmatches, where the current players placed in the match will be divided into two teams (Red vs Blue) 5. Administration Panel - The ability for Game Masters to adjust game settings, silence, mute, kick or ban users, etc. The battle continues! -Rob, the guy making this badass game!