So, if you come here frequently, or you've just looked at the frequency of posts, it's recently been a bit of a decent break for me. I took two weeks of holiday from work (such luxe!) - there's two reasons for that.
Firstly, I went for a lovely holiday with my wife, and we had a delightful bit of switching off from the world. We both took books for the evenings, and good boots for some serious hiking in the mountains. We ate, we drank, we read and we relaxed.
*chef's kiss*
Secondly, from the day after we got back, we've been going at full throttle painting the house and I also built up another addition to the garden. So, of the fourteen days of break all up, there's four days left. We're both feeling utterly accomplished, but it's been about ten days with next to no programming on my end. I did a few bits here and there, but after labouring all day, there's not much left in the tank mentally, so there's nothing super huge to celebrate.
The good news is, that there is indeed four days left before I'm back at work. Which means I've got some good coding time ahead of me. There's a plan for what I want to get done even.
Roughly, in order: Change the code and app so that NPC images aren't stored in the app resources, but downloaded from the server and cached for use instead. Do the same thing for terrain information. Add content to the world. I'd also like to have a better way for the item data to be updated to the server than it is now, but I'm not locked into a particular method for that yet. There's enough there to keep me occupied anyhow.
So, lastly, in things that made me laugh, I started filling out the world in bit of work, and added in spiders (also, I wanted to check the graphics changes I'd done with creatures that were more than one square large) and so I quickly added a new zone area to the game, dropped in some creatures and ran my party in. Turns out the last time I used spiders, I'd been mucking about with stats to check ability logic. Anyhow, the spiders basically mauled my party of level 1 characters without breaking a sweat. At least I got to see that respawns were still working as they should be.