Tagged so I can follow this.
Deon, do you have a blog / website or something? With as many projects and things as you work on I'd almost like to have a central location for all of it
Such a random person like me has a hard time to make anything like blarg... bloogh... blog.
How long till it is playable?
What do you mean by "playable"? I learn Byond from scratch as I go. It's like a coding self-teaching.
With time it will get more stuff and will have something to do
.
Right now you can enter the game, roam around the map, chat with players, wear/unwear things which actually appear on you and attack other players or NPCs.
Today I've made bar music to play only in the bar and sound for those who enter it.
Also it took a major part of my day, but I've managed to make Pathfinding algorithm (I took a few existing, studied how they work, salvaged most of that, read some articles on A* pathfinding and slapped all this info together... strangely it works as intended).
As an appetizer to the pathfinder algorithm I've made a basic attack-through-click which takes distance into account.
So it's not long until we get angry NPCs which actually follow players. Right now the pathfinding algorithm can be used by players (you double-click a location and a user moves there, updating his path as new obstacles appear).
I just need to write a set of rules for NPCs to use it.