With three certifications down and the newest one in User Interface Design, the reconstruction of the site here will ultimately achieve a few new goals -- much better mobile compatibility, complete the validation to HTML 5 standards, and a bit of a new look and feel.  I still love the original theme that I'd gone with for my site, but I realize not everybody enjoys a dark theme.  When I have time, I think it would be ideal to offer theme options, but in the meantime, I'm going to go with something more neutral and professional.

After just 30 days in school, I'm over 40% done with my program.  I've also just earned my first (of 6) certifications yesterday -- CIW Site Development Associate.  The progress is going to be a bit slower now that I've knocked out almost all of the gen-ed classes and will be primarily focused on the harder core classes now, but I'm fairly confident with the pace I've maintained that I may have a good chance to complete the entire program within my first 6-month term.  That term should end toward the end of November I believe - and as these classes should be much more "fun" (well, my kind of fun) I hope to remain just as engaged all the way through.

Development is a bit slowed down right now.  With having just started classes and having the opportunity and motivation to complete them as quickly as possible, I've been pouring a lot of my free time into schooling so I can knock out my Bachelors in Software Development as quickly as possible.

Classes started on the 1st, and I should have the first 6-month term completed by the end of this week.  I don't expect to keep up this pace as the courses increase in difficulty, but my goal is to have the degree completed within a year, and hoping for this year if time permits.

I realize not many are reading my updates, but I appreciate the support I've had from friends this year.  After a very rough start to the year, I decided to focus only on the positive, and improve myself in every way possible.  More to come soon.  :)

Now that the construction system is nearing completion, new bugs have appeared in the original system for storing items in storage containers.  This was to be expected, as I added a lot of new changes into the classes that were originally responsible for items and dropped blocks, and changed a lot of the now-outdated functionality.

Normally I would rely on debugging through the Unity console, but instead I decided to add a few quality of life upgrades before looping back to  combat the problem.  Most notably, I've integrated floating text and floating progress bars for actions such as digging and building, which was actually helpful not just in development but will also serve a great purpose in the actual gameplay (after some formatting and polishing - everything is going to stay pretty ugly for a while).

Added some "fun" new features to GoneViral, including some basic lighting (much more to come on that when the time is right), and cleaned up tons of bugs.  A lot of what's being added now won't be visible or accessible in the final product, but it's needed for development and testing.  Of course, it's gonna be ugly for quite a long time until the gameplay itself functions on a real level.  In the screenshots below you can see visible indicators of how some of the pathfinding logic works to determine the best way to do certain jobs by looking at what is closest, what is reachable, and a number of other factors.

Creating a "job" system was done a while ago for basic things like digging a block, or building a construction item, but the added feature of chaining jobs together has now made it possible to create job children which chain together to create much more complexity.  For example, picking up an item and adding it to player inventory is one job, storing it in a storage unit is another -- but with the combined system they are not listed or executed separately, they execute consecutively and seamlessly.