Concept: Footprints.

Today I did some work to try to improve the single texture graphics mode. It's already looking much better, The character shadows follow the nearest light source which makes them look very real.

I did some other experiments which didn't work out, and I also did some work on footprints.

I've done footprints before with a different game and there are two approaches, one is just a basic approximation, adding footprints space the player moves and orienting them towards the last square they came from. The other way needs me to get data from the player's skeleton and can place footprints very realistically but it does make things much more complex and over complexity is something I want to avoid if I can.

I tried it out, walking around the map for about 15 minutes, leaving a trail of little black footprints all over the place. It didn't slow down the game at all. It's a nice effect, though I may make them a little bit more transparent, It shows you quite quickly where you've been, and also where monsters have been. If you wandered in to a new area of the map and found lots of footprints on the ground you could expect that a group of wandering monsters is nearby. If you see some footprints avoiding some tiles for no reason, you might have discovered a trap!

They would be very useful indeed if you've chosen to play without an in game map. Kind of a trail of breadcrumbs. The only problem I can see is that they would rather build up over time, and if you did a lot of backtracking the whole map would soon be full. Also if you leave a level and then come back, all the footprints will have to be saved and loaded again, which seems a bit much.

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