Sorry for the long silence, there just hasn't been much to report - but hopefully that should change soon. The same issues I discussed in my last update are still the cause for the lack of updates: I've been working on unglamorous behind-the-scenes features, and at a slow pace due to my day job. 

That said, I will hopefully be soon able to show off at least a bit more. I am trying to pivot development to focus more on core gameplay for at least long enough of a stretch to start publicly showcasing things - or at least having current screenshots! I've finally got the map shader to a shippable state, and cities are being loaded into the map. 

The next step is to be able to dynamically present the cities. Basically, the problem right now is that because I've decided to represent every city in the world (with over 100k people, plus regional capitals and largest regional cities and a handful of other notable cities which fall below this threshold), that represents distinct in-game objects for over 4000 cities. This, unsurprisingly, causes the Unity engine to slow down considerably, by which I mean it chugs. The plan to deal with this is to not have all of those objects on at the same time, because they never need to be. Instead, I'm just going to have the cities active if they're in the region the player is currently looking at, or in that region's neighboring regions. 

Once that's in place, I might even be able to release a limited demo version of the game where you can explore the world map, if anyone would be interested in that. I'd like to have that ready to go by the end of the week - assuming I can manage to refill my ADHD medication, and my other hobbies don't distract me.