Today is a good day! It feels good to make some solid progress after a few days of head scratching over one specific problem.

I've implemented two new things - and I'm super excited by both!

The first thing I've done is extend the routines that control the generation of random scenery. You can read about when I first implemented this feature here.

I've tweaked the load functions, and added a new save function which kicks in automatically to update the positions of everything in each room. This means that I can now permanently modify the states and positions of existing objects, and add objects created as gameplay happens!

The first example of this is that I've added a little 'scorched-ground' sprite that gets created when the player dies to add weight to the death.

Player death explosions now leave a permanent scar where you died [hi res]

Really excited about this change - for one the immediate feature I've put in is pretty fun, but secondly it's super extendible! This means that I can add/remove things at will as the game is happening, permanently adding, removing, or changing attributes of the scenery in the rooms! It's really simple to add things to this model so I hope to be able to add lots of methods of interactivity!

This feature was mildly awkward to implement, not helped by the frankly 'difficult-when-your-project-exceeds-a-certain-size' Fusion event editor, and that it was in an area I've not touched for a while. It was one of those amusing fixes where you reset everything to how you thought you did it the first time round and then it works for some reason ;)

The second thing I've added is a little tweak to the maze generation to make the mazes more interesting! I've added some negative space - rooms that have no entrance defined. These rooms make the mazes feel more varied, instead of a maze that covers the entirety of the grid we now have differing patterns!

The first three mazes I generated after making the change.

In the images above, note how there's now some rooms that have no doors! I'm interested in potentially making these into secret areas that the player can enter with an as yet undecided ability.

Another couple of cool things to share include a fun thing that happened the other day; I found a little effect from 2 years ago that I'd completely forgotten about!

It's weird I've been working on this project for so long that I'd actually forgotten that I made that effect! I wonder what else I've got lurking in the code waiting for me to find..!

Finally, I added a new text prompt just to announce that the room you are in is complete! It's pretty simple at the moment and I might come back to it later.

ROOM CLEAR! [hi res]

Wow, that's it I think! Often I feel like this project is crawling along, and then sometimes I sit down to create a new blog-post not knowing what to write! Today I've been pleasantly surprised by everything I've managed to do in the last couple of weeks. Progress with the new HD video has halted a bit as I've been waiting on getting a new capture device - that's in the post now so I can't wait to get recording next week!

Thanks for reading if you got this far! Catch me on Twitter if you want to get in touch!