These islands are coming along!
As you can see in the gif islands now share seeds across clients, have procedurally generated palm trees (still requiring prettification) and tides. Still haven't started any gameplay elements though but for know I'm really enjoying this game.
Also I need to synchronise more things, waves are quit predictable, so very little bandwidth needs to be waisted to keep those pretty much synchronised, as for the players I haven't even got started, but using what I've already done it should only take an hour or so once I get down to it.
As for now I'm gonna start implementing gameplay features, not the fun ones yet, but utility things like the inventory, clothing, physics, food and health things. I've decided I'm going to try the organised route, where I make a flexible well implemented base, then start adding on game mechanics when the base is ready. This is in stark contrast to how I've developed games in the past, where I've acted like an overly excitable child in a sweet store, adding gameplay here and there to make a game as fun and flashy as early as possible, but often then having to continuously go back and fix things I rushed to make. I think this approach is also why I give up games quite often, because I start out really hard and fast and enjoying everything I'm doing, then end up slowing down because of the number of things I have to fix, and because of a poor game structure new features become harder and harder to implement, so the whole project goes stale.
This time should be different though, I'm pacing myself and I'm saving the pudding till last, so I have something to look forward too.
Lot's of food analogies today, I must be hungry.