I'm bad at this blogging thing

Wow I went a week between blog posts, I'm sorry about that.  Hopefully that will not happen again but, no promises :).  I can promise that I've still been hard at work here on the project.  It's taking a little bit more shape but more importantly so is the codebase.  In the last week I've incorporated a lot of new capability into the code,



namely:

• completely overhauled the GUI system.  We're now able to do neat things like render the game world into a texture and then render that texture into a window that is draggable across the main game window.
• segmented the mapping system so that we're now capable of having a map which contains entry points into additional maps.
• segmented the pathfinding system so that we're now capable of performing pathfinding on any number of agents across any number of game maps all simultaneously.
• implemented a wall creation tool that allows the user to click and drag walls across the terrain in vertical and horizontal directions.
• implemented a bulldozer tool that allows the user to destroy previously created walls to create openings for pathfinding.
• implemented an AutoTiling solution which allows the map to create corners and intersections in the walls automatically.
• implemented a state manager for the application object which allows the program to switch seamlessly between states (menu, game, etc) with a brief loading period between each state if necessary.
• implemented options menu which allows the user to set graphical options without requiring the need to restart the application.
• implemented sound library system and some basic UI feedback effects.

I also need to mention that I switched rendering libraries since last week.  Previously I was using the SDL package for rendering but I have moved over to SFML.  SFML is an object oriented library as opposed to SDL which is C-style, if you understand what that means :).  SFML is much easier to use, provides me with some better plug-in libraries for it, and importantly also seems to be much faster at rendering the same exact scenes.  SFML utilizes OpenGL compared with SDL's D3D/OGL hybrid, is also cross platform, and in addition also has iOS/Android components in the works which is great news.  It's an excellent piece of software and I recommend it to anyone looking to get started with game development.

I'm currently looking for a hand with acquiring art assets necessary for the completion of the kickstarter-prototype build.  Anyone interested in helping out can contact me here (cleavetvtube@gmail.com).  Thanks to all you guys!