Over the holidays, I kept thinking about how nice it would be to call AO a game and not just an engine, as well as taking some hints from the author of Gratuitous Space Battles, specifically his article on how to stay motivated. One of his points is to write down a list of what you did each day, so here is the start of that tradition:

• Added a mission select screen that gives the option to start the tutorial, or start a never-ending mission.
• Added a little dot beside the selected menu item on the main menu and play a sound when you mouse over. It looks and sounds very cool.
• Removed the default health of 100 and customized each Entity to have their own health value. This makes it possible to have fun in the never-ending mission.
• Researched briefly how to change some of my hard-coded method names that I store in strings. I couldn’t find an easy way right away, so I left that for future refactoring.
• Modified how the spaceships flock slightly. They should stay together a little bit more now. There is still a slight problem with their course, and I feel it’s due to floating point precision, but it could also be an error in my flocking math.
• Replaced the two singletons I had with instance variables that get passed around because of a few articles I read on the subject, and the fact that I could see it hurting my code quality over time.