Work contines on the game, albeit slowly... trying to keep from being unemployed in April. Although that would free up some time for game work, I can't really afford to move back into my parent's basement at the moment.

The major hurdle right now is to get the combat engine started on top of the existing interface. There's a lot of unknowns, like code size and UI design, that could easily end up eating up what's left of my available RAM. Which makes it easier for my mind to slip back to other less worrisome tasks, like map designs and whatnot. At this point, I'm feeling stubborn about cutting any more features so I will probably use the Supercart for the extra 8k to finish the job and do an AMS version later.

I was also examining some of my planned dialogue structures, and decided I didn't want to have to go short on text. I've realized a CRPG is defined by the quality and amount of the dialogue, so I reorganized my file system with the full intent of giving the game plenty of room for it. My forecasted result is that the game's data will take four 180k disks, three-quarters of a megabyte!

On that note, my next article will focus on text and dialogue, both the crunchy bits (how to compress text, etc) and the importance of it in the CRPG genre.