After giving some previews of the chargen system to my friends, I found the ability to customize leg stance was kind of undervalued... everybody chose either straight legs or the original slightly wide stance, and a majority went for the straight ones. They were also of the opinion that walking animation would be better.

So I've decided to drop the different stances and add walking animations. This along with a change to how arm movement is handled (since icons are mono-directional, I'm using directions to turn icon_state into a multidimensional array... north raises one arm, east raises the other, northeast for both at the same time) is going to simplify making clothing overlays quite a bit. More variety in body shape is something I can always add after launch.

Having more visual feedback from the game when you're doing something is great, but it kind of exacerbates the feeling of lack of responsiveness from delay-and-tile-based movement, to the point that I'm thinking of breaking out of one of my self-imposed design constraints.

I spent a few minutes this past weekend figuring out how hard it would be to make a smoothly autoscrolling sidescrolling space shooter with BYOND's pixel movement (answer: not very.) and was impressed with how easy and seamless the native pixel movement is. From the beginning I've wanted differing movement rates to be a key part of the game, but if fast characters move twice as fast as average characters than a melee battle is no contest. So, small differences are the key. And pixel-based movement allows small differences.

What I'm working with now still involves a built-in movement delay, but one that operates between 0.5 and 2 tenths of a second most of the time. The point of having the movement delay is it allows me to add "slow" and "fast" conditions without altering how step_size is calculated.

I wasn't 100% sure that I was going to do this, but I just did a quick test with a pixel-moving PC and liked what I saw... then I got into combat and compared that to the movement of the enemies and, yeah. It makes such a difference. I think I'm going with this. With so much of the combat system devoted to things like maneuvering around enemies and going back and forth with them, it just works better.