is this blog dead?

You might think so.  Hard to say for sure though.

I've been working since late december on slycrel: combat.  It's been an interesting divergence into the world of TMX maps, atlas sprites, A* algorithms, height maps, and more.

Thought I'd post a picture for you to have a look at.  From this atlas sprite:

We are creating a world that can look something like this:

You will notice all of the red tiles above are building blocks that can be used later. I expect once we start rounding out the edges of the terrain that these will disappear quickly, not to mention better/more varied graphics.  The roads are the most recent addition with the path-finding and need work on displaying properly among other things.  Tapping moves the player to the square tapped on as appropriate.

All in all it's a great start.

Additionally the water and snowy mountains are not passable, with sound effects. We are also working on a windowing system that will show text information as well when you collide with a monster.  This will likely work differently later, but for now it's this way for testing.

Fun stuff!  The best part of this is that I'm trying to make all fo this code reusable as much as possible.