January 2024 was a month all about laying down some groundwork

This month, we completely redid our Iconography, and overhauled the way icons are both displayed and how we make the art for them.

Everything we've made so far has been organized into a better folder structure and all items, weapons, doodads, even parts of the human face, all got permanent icon representation. 

Everybody got an icon. Even Buildings and Trees.

This had to be done for the sake of consistency, and alleviating the burden on coders today and modders tomorrow, who wold need to make tedious adjustments to the world art assets to fit them inside the circle. Originally that was done in code to save data, but these icons only added 14MB. Gave or take. For over 700 things.

We also continued laying down our character so they can sleep, die, fall down, and be carried away. 

This has, obviously, been quite a process for Allegra, who has to revisit every worn item and body element. Thankfully the females are wrapped up, and now she's going back over the males. 

If one day for whatever reason we need to switch from fully realized 8 directional rotation to just those cardinal directions, this will still be 2 extras, but that's alright. Now that we know, from here on, it's easier to account for.

We also added a big list of "doing" animations, which will serve the role of informing the player visually what a character is doing if they are ever just idly standing at a workstation or bobbing next to a wall, in a pleasant and interesting way.  

This way you know Gaius is reloading and not just standing there, like a dumb pawn.

They will also indicate Alerts or Searching behavior, or conversations -- things like that. 

Curtis also wrapped up the "Enclosure" system, by which we can detect if a room or building is closed or not. This will allow us to do fun stuff like detect if a building or room is breached, such as during a raid or fire, and recalculate pathfinders, tag it for repairs, and deal with room temperature.

But it also has come with some bugs.

And it's taken many weeks.

It is good that we can begin at least to see it in action in a visual way. The "ghost" previews will make a comeback after this debug feature is done.

Cliffs have also enjoyed their long awaited overhaul, and can now tile landscapes on top as we talked about last December. This will make everyone's lives much easier when mining and our lives a lot simpler too.

This is our first step towards working elevation layers as well, So you'll be able to get up on top of these and shoot down from them, or attack defenses up on top of the cliff. These height layers are still a big source of frustration and data management, but we get asked about it non-stop, if Z-Levels will be a thing or not.

Our answer right now is that it's a lot more like StarCraft than RimWorld. We'll dabble in z-height, but not much. It will not become like an FPS game with many levels, just at most, 3. 

A base playing field, and a level up from that, and a level down from that. With buildings & caves only existing on the ground plane. 

It just makes the gameplay that much simpler, easier to read, and lets us focus on the most important information rather than struggle with information overload, trying to figure out who is on level -1 or whatever, when hidden from view. 

There was a LOT more covered this month, but it was a month also of pushing the timeline a little bit down the road. Some of these tasks just took longer than we anticipated, which happens.