So here`s a quick update on progress made.
Before if you can remember we showed you a small clip on navigating around the map and the village with a few trees dotted around.

Today I have a small clip showing you a new type of context menu we are working on..
It’s Still very early days so please excuse rough items we are still working from sketches.

We have randomised the village shape as before it was a large generated hexagon - now we can randomly generate all our island maps and villages.

We also have included a small resource ticker that will calculate if you have enough resources like wood to construct your selected buildings.
(You should see it bottom right of the screen. When I place the building down the ticker goes down and begins to count back up.)

We have included 3 temporary building examples - these buildings are just for demo purposes and we will not be using these in the final release - it is just there to help visualise the game. Lumbermill, Quarry and a mansion of different dimensions. As you can see when we place a building down it appears half built; we are working on the JS refresh timer to display complete constructed items, at the moment we have the building complete timer set to 15 seconds. If I was to refresh the page after the 15 seconds of placing the building you would see the construction has been completed.

We also have object detection in place so now you can no longer build on a tile that already has something on it until it is destroyed.

Hope you enjoy.

Since September 2009 I have been working on a small game engine - which I hope to release as open source - after its predicted beta test release date

The engine is ie6+ compatible and of course works in all other browsers - so far tested and working in ie6+, FF, Opera, Chrome, Safari. k.

Here is a quick mini teaser of the dev environment::

I was on Ajaxian today and saw another engine built on similar technologies as mine - the Aves Engine. It’s still very early days for me and at the moment there are only 2 of us on the project but who knows we`ll see how it goes. You could always use mine as a free alternative if you are thinking of developing a nice web based game

We are also working on a mini game for the engine so you will be able to see the power of the engine in use.
We are using a slight different approach working with jetanhex (hexagon) tiles instead of the standard square isometric tiles which seems to work quite well for us as you can see in the mouse over examples in the above demo.

Ps. For some reason when I was recording the movement of the browser seemed to stager? But as soon as I stopped recording the game dynamics and scrolling appeared to be extremely smooth.