One of the worst parts about designing a game engine is that a whoooole lot of the work you do goes into the underlying infrastructure, which tends to be rather boilerplate work that facilitates content when it’s done, but does not actually produce much of anything you can actually show others when it’s still in progress as proof that you’re actually getting work done.  Such is the case right about now – I’ve been working on enabling location navigation within the game engine now, which is basically taking us up one more level: locations contain characters, with whom you can get into encounters, as was demonstrated in the last video.

Unfortunately, I’ve still got a ways to go as far as work goes on this part of the game engine, but since I’m a tease, here are some early screenshots to tide you over and reassure you that I am in fact working on this game:

Also, since I’m feeling extra tease-y tonight, I can also report that good progress has been made on the actual underlying story for the first case in the game (the one that all videos and screenshots have depicted to date).  I’ve had some people ask me what exactly the plot is, and to be honest until recently I was honestly not too sure – I had a vague sense that was good enough for the mock-up scenarios created to demo the game engine, but I had no real clear, coherent idea where it was going.  That’s no longer the case – I’ve been in conversation with a couple of people about that particular case, and I now have a pretty darn good sense for how it’s all going to go, so there should now be a coherent narrative in screenshots and videos from now on.

…Of course, if you want to know exactly what happens, you’ll have to just wait! 😛

(And yes, those are the sprites from Desktop Ponies in the first picture.  I needed small sprites with walking animations, so those seemed extremely convenient.  I hope no one involved in the creation of those sprites minds.  Like I keep reminding people… all visuals and audio are preliminary, and exist only to demo the game engine!)