BUILD v0.1.6 HAS BEEN RELEASED!BY WOLFIt's been a quieter week than usual on the design end of things. I've rebuilt v0.1.7's GDD based on several new design parameters we've implemented. I'm currently working on a gang name generator given there will be hundreds of AI gangs in the game in the near future. One of the ways in which I'm doing this is by collating the name of every street categorized by borough in NYC. I won't be able to collate them by neighborhood, but this is a great start so far. An added benefit later down the road will be rpg driving, with street names built into the mechanic's narrative.
v0.1.6 completed a successful cycle of internal testing (a big thank you to all our testers), and we were able to patch a few issues quickly. One we've not solved yet appears to be the test map going black on dual monitors. But we will eventually be moving to our own renderer rather than console emulation and this will allow us to work on solving issues like this with more ease.
v0.1.7 has already entered development and with our new protocol of focusing on 1 major design feature each build, rapid progress has been made (we split the original 1.7 into 1.7 and 1.8, the first covering maps (city, borough, neighborhood) and the second covering combat). Neighborhood maps will be more abstract than borough and city maps, with random generation based on certain rules as more features are added to it. For now it merely displays corner locations.
BY NERDRAGEThe initial UI implementation is complete! It will be much faster and less error-prone to add new menus with rich functionality from now on. The changes are too numerous to list, it was a complete rewrite from ground up.
We are now using the full extent of the console emulator's pseudo-graphics output: colors, drawing characters, font and window controls. Localization, color themes and custom keybinds are now supported by the program architecture, and the appropriate front-end for them is being devised. One last thing, those with big resolutions may find the NumPad + button useful.