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.