Still super busy. Regardless, I have actually been getting a little bit done. I've started mocking up level generation in HTML since it's very fast to iterate on it (and Javascript is very close to Actionscript), and I'm slowly working out how I want to do it.

Yep. Hopefully I will get back in the groove soon.

Work has been eating up a lot of time lately, and I just had a low-to-mid level cold for a couple of weeks. I'm just generally feeling pretty low energy so I haven't been terribly productive.

Have decided that AI is sufficient for the time being. I'll probably come back to it, but since it's now somewhat okay I will leave further work there 'til later so I don't just end up putting it all off forever.

So I'm now cleaning up the experience-gaining stuff and making it actually do things. Yep. I need to figure out a good stat growth mechanic, but other than that it's pretty straight-forward.

I'm also starting to gear up my next game(s). Doing exploratory stuff in terms of engines and art. We'll see where that all leads me in the new year, hopefully.

Ack, forgot to post last night. Broke my streak. Curses!

Anyway, continued work on the monster AI. I've figured out how I'm going to break things down; roughly speaking I have "high-level" AI and "low-level" AI. A monster is assigned a high-level thought process (presumably) which basically checks current conditions and then calls into low-level AI behaviours. I'm also writing some of the helper functions I mentioned in my last post.

Hopefully with the next post I'll be done this stuff! Then, probably on to... improved level generation, I think.

Okay! Have started implementing the new AI stuff. Not too far, but goblins will now chase you down and punch you to death.

Yeah work's still been pretty busy. But I have a four day weekend soon, so hooray! I am hoping to split the time between sleeping and making games.

I've been pretty crazy busy with work this week so I haven't gotten a whole lot of anything done. My next task, though, is going to require some thought, and so in the spare minutes I've been thinking a lot.

So the next thing that I've decided to build is better monster AI. Right now every monster simply roams around, and doesn't react at all if you do anything to it. My plan for a better AI is to build a few different generic types, with the ability to transition between them based on circumstances. This allows for a peaceful, wandering monster to turn into an angry hunter monster if it is attacked, for instance.

I've also been working on what sort of things I need to build to support what I need. Flixel has A* stuff baked into it, so my pathing will be much better than the hilariously bad "smash your face into a wall until you eventually slide off into the player" pathing from Hyacinth. I need to write something which will quickly decide "can X entity see Y location" or, maybe, "give me a list of all locations that X entity can see"; I already have that code for the lighting engine, so it shouldn't be too hard. I just hope I don't run into any problems with speed. Another thing I'll need to build is an equipment-use optimizer; it's silly to give monsters equipment and then not do anything with it.

So those are my goals. I'll be trying to get to actually implementing them soon.