Look, up in the sky!

So the thing I’m most excited about today is that I finally cracked the nut of how to get the developers up above the ground (and, for that matter, how to handle flight in general).  I was really annoyed to always have those developer cursors crawling along the ground, half-hidden under the ground!  Here you can see a group of developers that are in the process of placing some monsters (currently displayed as red boxes)

I’m also thrilled to have the mountainous region boundaries back.  I lost them for a bit after converting to the “paint-on” terrain interface, but I’ve got them back again now!  The player can use the brush tools to make the mountainous areas at the borders of each region wider, but cannot actually remove the mountain borders;  they’re permanent fixtures of the world.  Eventually, there’ll be a type of building you can place to make a small pass through the mountains, to allow subscribers to travel from one region to another.

But neither of those were really important fixes;  just little visual touches that I was glad to get in.  I also got a good start on some more game mechanics.

In the screenshot here, the big pillar in the background marks what I’m currently calling a “Grinding Zone” (suggestions for better names are welcome!)  Basically, you place one of these to tell your developers that you want there to be monsters to fight in that general area.  You will be able to (but cannot yet) specify how big the area is, what type of monsters should be there, what levels they should be, and how many you want.  Once you have “Grinding Zones” placed, subscribers will go to them when they want to fight monsters.  Alternately, you can use them as destinations for hunting quests, to force your poor subscribers to defeat twenty spiders and then return.