Blurry, Dotted Lines

If you're reading this at any time other than 2013, the title refers to some song. Don't worry, it's not relevant.

One feature I put in quite a while back is the ability to click far away from a character, and through pathfinding (not initially A*, but I put that in, and it's much better now), the character will move to the destination.

One somewhat confusing thing about that is that this is a turn-based game, and each character gets one hex of movement per turn, even if they have 10 moves of path queued up. This wasn't well communicated, even when I was standing over the shoulder of a player.

So. Now, there's a dotted line that helps the player understand the path that the character is currently planning to follow. With a little attention, the player can even do complex planning to have paths overlap. Good luck with that.

There's currently a bug in it where the first bit of the path is not correctly drawn while the character is animating from one hex to the next. I can fix that most easily by skipping the first segment if the character's current hex is not adjacent to the next hex.

Another thing I put in yesterday (but doesn't make a good screenshot) is the ability to complete level 0 and progress to level 1. Presumably, once I have a complete set of levels, completing the final level will show a victory screen.

Another bit of work (and another bug) that I put in is some NPC logic that will allow NPCs to attempt to navigate to remembered locations of PCs, even when the NPC can't see the PC. This is working pretty well, but occasionally, an NPC will get stuck after discovering the PCs again. I'm not sure what's going on there, but I imagine it's a thing that I can stick a breakpoint on and get some insight into.

I suspect I won't have time for real character advancement, but I've been toying with the idea of awarding one XP to each PC alive when an NPC is defeated, then use that at the end of a level for some amount of leveling up. Or, somewhat easier, on each level, give the characters stats appropriate to the level. Or, easier than that, do nothing. The second level right now is pretty difficult. So be it.