City Tech

Had a productive couple of nights. You can now enter cities from the world map and triggers at the edge of the map will take you back to the world.  I increase the zoom a fraction in cities/towns so it feels like the scale has changed slightly.

I'm going to keep the world mostly persistent. That is, if monsters chase you into a city, they will be waiting for you when you exit back out, along with any treasure chests you may have not picked up yet. I knocked up a quick serializer last night so now all the entities are saved to a file whenever you change maps. I'll still need to ensure that resetting the maps works with the game design because I'll need to do that when I release updates such as new towns and npcs. I think the best approach might be to timestamp the maps so they reset if you haven't been in the map for a game day.

I'm still evaluating what to do with my 'warp' tech in towns.  You'll see in the videos that all the tiles are not square like in other games,  there is a subtle curve through everything. I find this really improves the look of outdoors areas,  but looks really odd on hard structures like town walls.  I've been experimenting with techniques to flatten out the warp selectively, but its a little expensive at the moment on the first gen ipod's. Hopefully I can get some more performance out of it.

Next, I want to get my enchantments working. I'll release another video update on Friday and talk a bit about the game design and magic system.  So long till then.