It's been a long week, but fortunately some fairly large work has been made on the project. Fewer obvious bugs presented themselves this time. One wonders if that because the logic us more sound/secure, or simply because I haven't tested it all the way first. The most important being that doors now will no longer stay stuck in the open state, even while actually closed. This bug initially led to gates closing downwards perpetually, and as a result would sink further into the ground on each interaction. Funny, but not particularly helpful.

New added Good things

The first major update was the addition of stairs and ramps. It required a little rewriting on player movement, and some fairly serious troubleshooting, but now movement on stairs in both forward/backward, and shift left/shift right works as intended. The TileMap still only considers the case of a single tile with any given column and row of course, so having multiple floors on one TileMap may end up not being worth the work of adding that kind of context to TileMap generation.  

Along with stairs, fountains have been added into the game as well. At present the fountain is little more than a well, but in future this will be different. Castlemancy being what it is, has inherited numerous design ideas from previous 'blobber' type games, and I'm intending to mirror the rather evocative fountains in the aptly named Fountainhead starting village in might and magic 3.

Next up is some UI work, now Houses and Shops (mostly) have more appropriate stand in background graphics. These are intended to be animated, with one or two looped animations. This again is a design choice inherited from past rpg's, but one I'm very fond of. Unfortunately coming up with more than terrible placeholders was not going to happen within the last week.

Similarly, a few other placeholder images have found their way onto paperdoll backgrounds, shop signs, and even an attack particle effect. The last one doesn't work close to as intended as the transparency on the sprite just doesn't work, and is actually pretty distracting and ugly. I think instead of a classic sprite animation, a particle effect that -evokes- the old school style may work much better. It may work out that such hit effects are unnecessary once enemies react to being hit, but for now what is in will do the job.

Random Items:  The addition of random chest loot as well as random (item type appropriate) shop inventories has been a long standing goal for this project and now exists. Now generating an item on the fly is possible, and can even include random magical items as well. Similarly, buying new skills on characters has been added to the shops. Assuming a character can learn a given skill, now it costs a fairly small amount of gold in order to gain the skill. Each shop type has a list of thematically relevant skills, and in future several of these skills will be available at Temples and Inn's as opposed to solely being a feature of shops. Furthermore, the spell shop only supports a maximum of 4 trainable skills, but there is 7 magic skills that can be learned. A resolution to this particular problem will have to come in a future release.

The next major change involves quests. For a start quests can be completed, and may or may not include some kind of xp and gold. Additionally, some of the character dialogue logic has been adjusted to reflect what stage of a given quest the party is on. This led to rooting out a bug in which gaining any amount of xp would level a character forever. Sadly, this has been fixed.

Other minor changes include: Auto-map information, so a grid cell on the map will display some relevant information about what is on that particular tile (assuming it has been explored of course),  tile specific triggers such as automatically closing a door or teleporting the party to some pre-determined location. Cat race paperdoll has been rough sketched so it doesn't have to share with the wolf race paperdoll. Reset button fuctionality on character creation.

All in all the project grinds slowly toward a functional game. More content is of course the real labor in all of this, and still remains pushed into the unknown future, until most of the core game elements have been constructed. The current future priorities are a few extra test quests and more varied monsters (including Large monsters), and perhaps in world NPCs.