Today ended up being interesting. Taking a long walk at one point, I gave some thought to next steps, and they yielded some fruit.

Breaking the connection between the extent of scrolling in the world and the extent of the grid simplifies things a lot. I was able to make some minor progress in terms of getting buttons to appear and disappear (which involved some minor rearchitecting to put the game state in a more accessible place, since the controls needed access to it in a more dynamic way). So not much in terms of code.

The interesting part in my thinking was realizing it would be really cool if you didn’t have to specify the grid size – that it would actually be arbitrarily large and would figure out the minimal size based on where you place points. In other words, have it be truly sparse as I had originally intended. If I could do that, besides possibly being interesting to code, it could lead to the potential for larger levels, since it wouldn’t need a full grid of internal positions. That was my initial intention, before expedience pushed me to simply get something simple working.

Wow. The month is over half done. It has been a good experience doing these daily updates, as it forces me to do something. Well, two things actually: both writing the entry and doing something worth writing about to begin with.

Almost no longer a teenager. On to tomorrow.