More delays

The last few weeks have seen a decided lack of progress in the game, due to a bunch of conflicting priorities. Chief among those was getting some more work done in the basement; we're nearing completion of the drywall, which puts us only a few weeks away from being ready to move stuff in there and actually enjoy that space for the first time in the six years we've lived in this house. That'll be a nice change.

Another problem I've been dealing with is a severe lack of direction with the game. I've got a thousand things I could be doing, but none of them were clear winners in the "this needs to be done next" camp and all of them were big and awkward and require a fair bit of time and motivation to tackle. So the net result is that I felt like doing nothing.

I finally realised what was going on a couple days ago and have taken steps to correct it. The real problem that I've been facing is that there's no game in this game, and that's where I need to start. So I'm going to work on the basis of "what do I need to do next to make this more like a game?" And the first thing that came to mind was that, y'know, there needs to be an entrance to this dungeon... And voila, I have made a dungeon entrance!


I know it doesn't look like much, but that's because it's kind of living in isolation right now. It'll look a lot better once it's actually in place in a dungeon. I've got some work left to do on the floor (I stretched it out like crazy for the screenshot because I wanted it to be obvious what it was) and I've got some other tweaking to do, but overall I think everything's in pretty good shape. Sometime this weekend I'm hoping to finish it up enough to get it in place in the game, then start spawning creatures from it.

After that... well, there are a bunch of things I could tackle after that. I'll probably need to start by switching out my hacked-up UI library for something a little more robust, which I think I can accomplish with a single day's work, and then I can start experimenting with playing the game to see what elements I need to work on to make things actually fun.

My goal is still to get an early demo out there before the baby's born, which gives me another month (hopefully). I don't know if I can make it, but I'm sure going to try!