I’ve been working on tile system features, how loot is managed and fixing a few bugs. It’s not very photogenic stuff! Fortunately, continuing the theme of making the game’s inner workings more visible, I’ve just added a list of active buffs/debuffs.
So now when something’s affecting you, you know it’s there and you know how long it’ll last. This’ll be especially useful when I get the terrain buffs working. (Moving through hedges will be slow but stealthy! That sort of thing.)
I’m currently going over two things in my head: shops and AI placement. Shop-wise, I think I’ll have vendors scattered through the game world that have one to three items for sale at fairly high prices; gold will carry over between playthroughs, up to a limit; and if you quit a level before all the monsters are dead, you’ll get extra gold as a bonus to compensate for less XP.
As far as AI placement goes, I’m contemplating putting most of the monsters in game into squads. Squads will tend to hang around each other, and when you alert one of them the rest will become alerted as well. It’s a way to make these open town, cave and forest areas a little more interesting, to stop you from easily pulling one enemy at a time as you clear through the level. Alerted AIs will also be able to open doors sometimes, too, so perhaps when you sneak up on someone and surprise them another AI will bust through a door behind you…
Well, back to it. The to-do list’s getting longer as quickly as it’s getting shorter; I need to fix that 😀