Oh happy day!· Lots and lots done over the last couple of days - I can now export doorways from my level editor and have them appear and work in the game.·I just want to add a lock system to the doors (YOU NEED THE BLUE KEY!) and that'll be that.· Right now I've got 2 levels (or more correctly "areas" since you can move freely between them) - a street and a subway station.· I'll be adding the subway trains tomorrow.· Here's the (very basic) station, with some nice lights which I need to adjust:

You can see the "mini-mode" HUD in top left, a rough-and-ready frame counter counter top-right, and there's my new pal Skwiz waiting on the platform for me.·I can exit the level simply by pressing UP on the left thumb stick  .·When I do,I appear at the subway entrance on Westlake Avenue:

On this screen you can see the Police icon above Officer MacGraw there.· It only shows up when you're pretty close (200 pixels) to the character, and if the police officer in question is after you it'll flash red and blue.· It needs a little transition polish but it works very nicely.· I'll be adding name signs tomorrow too, for both the streets and the subway stations.· I'll also need to add a "pay fair" mechanic, partly to allow you to choose your destination when the train arrives.·Taxis are also on the list of things to do, along with items (extra yoyos, health, spraycans and other fun stuff.· One last step in the current run of import tool changes is to add AI character import, but that's really a half-hour job.

I felt like I was struggling to get anywhere today, but all the code changes came together late in the afternoon and everything worked very nicely.  It really didn't take that much actual code to get between levels, but it's spread about the code so took a while to tidy and hook up.  Happily I'm coding in a really nice, efficient and flexible way so shifting things about hasn't been a problem.  I think a couple more days of solid work and we should see the first basic mission added in - I've got some pretty solid ideas of how to handle them in code, mainly based on my experiences with Space Pirates.  It'll need a fair few more characters, but I'm getting used to getting them down and refining them now and anyway at this stage more or less all the art is "placeholder" until a later stage - probably full playtest.  I want to have close to a month in playtest as a more-or-less finished game, to get the play balance right and also to give me sufficient PR time.  Xenocide seems to have suffered from my lazy marketing approach, so this one's going to get all the bells and whistles.  So I'm pretty hapy with the progress made over the last few days, and I've been sticking to working 9am - 6pm (ish), and getting lots of sleep.  That seems to be helping my focus and the quality of the code.  Anway speaking of sleep...Pip pip!

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