I posted a small update to A Miner Adventure earlier today. There are some things I would have liked to add but didn't have the time for it. Here's what I did add:

* With the Builder's Kit you can now build tracks, mine carts, and lights.
* You can press N to toggle the display of player names.
* Survival maps reset when the game starts.
* Display options are now only configurable by the player in charge.

There were also some bug fixes. You can view the full list of changes here, you can report new bugs there too.

Edit: Sidescroller Update
I just put together the changes I had been making to my Sidescroller library and posted an update. I was hoping to post the update this coming Friday but it was ready early, so you get it now. The biggest change is the addition of hair.dm which adds randomly selected hair overlays to all mobs.

The full list of changes is shown on the library's hub entry. The other big changes include the addition of mario-demo, which is a new demo showing how to implement features from Mario games. Most of the other changes don't add new features, they just restructure how the same features work. The move_speed, climb_speed, and fall_speed variables were defined for mobs. Instead of the move() proc having a hard-coded speed limit it uses the move_speed var. A new proc called action() was created to take part of the functionality of the movement() proc. It doesn't change how things work, but it lets you change the mob's behavior by overriding action, which is often simpler than overriding movement.

I highly recommend reading through the reference section of _readme.dm. It contains descriptions of all vars and procs defined by the library. It might seem daunting - if you just learned DM you don't want to have to learn all these vars and procs that I defined. I understand, but you don't need to know most of them (I couldn't name half of them off the top of my head). Once you get an idea for what the library can do, you'll begin to see how easy it can be to implement things using the library.

I started on a new project I've been calling Tiny Heroes. It's a sidescrolling action RPG. Here are some screenshots:







I don't have much work done, just graphics mostly. The details that I have figured out bear an odd resemblance to Diablo 2. I'm planning on having 5 character classes: assassin, necromancer, wizard, knight, and druid. Swap paladin in for knight and sorceress for wizard and you've got Diablo 2. While I was a big Diablo fan, it wasn't really my source of inspiration for this.

I'm trying to play up the action-platformer side of the game, so a lot of the abilities are movement based. Your character isn't just measured by the amount of damage it can deal, but by how it can move. All abilities are specific to a class and each character has a major and minor class. You get all of your major class's abilities but only some from your minor class.

Assassins have a faster base movement speed and can climb walls. Wall climbing is only available if it's your major class, but characters with assassin as a minor class get the increased movement speed. Necromancers have Bone Spear (which you can see in the screenshots) which deals damage and creates platforms you can stand on. You might be inclined to take assassin as your major class because of the wall climbing, but you can use bone spear to create platforms to scale walls.

Both classes benefit your maneuverability in ways that can be equated (if both classes had to scale a wall, they could), but the RPG aspects of the game will make use of the subtle differences. Assassins can't do anything while they're climbing a wall, but necromancers can stand on the bone spears, face the room, and attack. However, the necromancer's bone spear costs mana. If the game was purely a platformer the abilities would be much more equivalent.

I'm hoping that the mix of RPG and platformer, as well as the class combinations, gives enough variety that each character is a distinct experience. I intend for the majority of the game's content to be doable as a single player, but it will definitely support multiple players. Ideally the game's chat will be universal across all instances (even non-hosted instances, provided you're connected to the internet) so you can chat with everyone that's playing the game, but everyone gets their own copy of the world. If you want to party with someone you can join their server, but there's no sense in bogging down a server because you have 30 people in 30 corners of the world doing 30 different things.