It's been a rather inspiring time, and while development didn't advance quite as much as I would have liked it - the last two months were a time of many ideas, things becoming more clear and getting things settled:

Traces of Illumination for the iPhone: As there's Unity for the iPhone now, there will be a multiplayer iPhone port of Traces of Illumination. There's a couple of nice things about that: As weird as it may sound, but there are some similarities between an iPhone port and designing a game server - namely that you have to optimize the hell out of your application to make it work smoothly. Obviously, there's also many differences between an iPhone port and the game server - but the similarities are enough to have some nice synergies. Also, I have a couple of fun ideas of how to actually implement the iPhone port. I'll need to try those before I'll post about them - but if it works the way I envision it, it will be very cool ;-) ... finally, having an iPhone port is pretty cool from the marketing perspective.

Traces of Illumination Mac Dashboard Widget: Obviously, game sessions in Traces of Illumination are usually very short. Just a few minutes. So the game is perfectly suited to be published as Widget of the OS X Dashboard for the "quick game in between". Also, there's a nice market place for Dashboard Widgets on the Apple site - so this adds to the visibility of Traces of Illumination to the public. One very nice thing about Unity is that building a Dashboard Widget from a game that's already available as Web player is pretty straightforward. I have a couple of nice ideas which will be specific to the Widget-Version but those will be announced with the first release ;-)

Refactor Traces of Illumination Networking: This is a rather technical issue. Basically, I started creating my networking layer with what was available in Unity 2.0, and there was a pretty cool enhancement in Unity 2.1 that I never had time change my implementation to. From some further load-testing experiments (with some of the iPhone optimizations that are also optimizations for the server) I realized that this area is most likely one of the key areas to get my servers to allow more simultanuous players. In fact, this is what I will start with as soon as I have finished getting this blog up to date ... which is ... almost done ;-)

Lots of Design-Details for the upcoming Levels: Keep in mind, I currently only have three levels completed - of 12 levels altogether. While I do have an abstract concept for each of the upcoming levels, there have been a lot of enhancements to those during the last couple of weeks.

Some "special models" for the upcoming Tracers: The last Tracers you get when you're pretty much at the end of what the game has to offer are somewhat "special". In particular, there are two Tracers of which I'm simply not able to do the modelling myself. But I have found some models I can purchase at reasonable prices to use for that purpose - so that's solved, too ;-)

The "Invite-Friends-Program": This is a thing that I had on my mind for a very long time already. However, I now finally have the "okay" from my lawyer. I won't go into the details here - but what I can tell is that as soon as I have this program in place, inviting your friends to play Traces of Illumination with you (which implies that they subscribe to the service, of course), will give you some nice benefits. The program is now "legally sound", the concept finished and it just needs some implementation time to get started. Oh ... if you have a Website and you'd like to have the Traces of Illumination Web player on that site, this thing might be particularly interesting for you.

Still very secret "Traces of Illumination Modules": Has to do with the previously mentioned "Invite-Friends-Program". I won't say more, yet - but that'll be pretty cool. So far, I have two such modules planned.

Creating a Company for Traces of Illumination what's to come: This is not perfectly official, yet - but I will incorporate. So that means I'm building my own company for my game development enterprises.

Marketing Research and Strategy Building: Well, basically, I'm keeping and updating a list of sites which I'm planning to use to get the word out to the world. And, I've spent some time creating a strategy of how I will use all the means available to get the word out in a way that will give me the opportunity to get more experienced in that area (which will be very helpful for future projects).