Summer.

It's getting really hot here. I live in South Korea and the summer is almost tropical. Last year my video card burned out, hopefully it's not going to happen again. :)

Anyway, I've been working on some new monsters to take advantage of the new Giant Rat agent archetype. I've tried to keep the absolute number of archetypes to a minimum, as many monsters as possible share armatures and animations to help save development time.

The Giant Rat has spawned 7 different monsters.

One of my favorites is the Cockatrice:

A dangerous monster from the lower levels.
Click for a video of the other monsters.

One of the places most associated with the original tale of the cockatrice, Wherewell near Andover, is just a few miles from my hometown in England. When I read about it I was quite homesick, I remember the many warm (but not tropical) summers I spent riding out to that small town where the cockatrice was said to have lived in a well. I used to swim in the stream with my friends and dry out in the sun with not a soul around for miles and miles.

I've also been working on the prefab editor which is up to version 6 now. I made some changes so map display is independent of indexes, but is rather gathered from a set of single letter strings in a look up dictionary. This means I can change the indexes as much as I want, adding or taking away different types of tiles as long as I keep the reference dictionary up to date.