Got to hang out with my lovely game developer peers today - including a couple of our fellow streakers ;) It was fun until the thunderstorm trapped us in the cafe - but the extra time was productive for some of us.

I spent most of my time staring at a blank map in tiled trying to figure out what to do with the starting area and how to build the town. I think I may have reached the limits of the free tilesets I'm using. They just aren't inspiring. It's OK when creating completely canned test environments to work on code, but fall short when actually trying to build a real area. I need to force myself to just put together some of the beginning scenarios and block out the key story beats but... it's just hard to be inspired when the art is so far off.

It may be something that I just need to lock myself in a room for a while and force myself to get a handle on it. A couple of the guys were treating their projects with a game jam mentality, with strict deadlines and scope management. I started this project because I was tired of game jams... but it might be time for some of that methodology to come in again. We'll see.

Just to make SOME progress I took another one of the easy tasks off the list and implemented doors you can lock/unlock (if you have the key) and open/close (if unlocked). It will open up a few more gameplay opportunities for sure, along with some new avenues to chew on the ai code.