Well it has been a while since I have posted but I have been working like crazy and a lot of progress has been made!
First of all Adam and I changed the entire game system from being frame based to being time based. Then Adam began to change everything over from a Tile Location based system to a Pixel Location based system.
Next we went and got player directional movement in and Creatures also animate smoothly in the world. In other words, the character actually faces and walks in the direction you want him to go in.
To speed development I am temporarily using some Warcraft 2 assets I downloaded. Here are some examples of directional sprite maps I am using:


After that, Adam and I got the camera viewport to smoothly scroll around the world, just like it did in the old game.
Now it was time to hook up some of our older systems and see if they were still going to work.
Props, what we call the various and sundry items that exist in the world but don’t have an AI driving them, like beds, flags, and chests, went back in with no problems at all.
I was pleasantly surprised that creatures also went in with very little effort. Soon I got Enemies actively searching for and chasing after the Player.
It’s hard to take screen shots of this as it is happening, but here are a few that might better illustrate what is happening:

As the game starts, the Player is the blue warrior in the upper left hand corner of the screen. The skeleton is an Enemy with a search range of 3 tiles. You will also notice that there are some temporary Props in the game to test pathfinding and animating props. That machine should look familiar to fans of the original game.

As the player starts to get closer, the skeleton ‘sees’ the player and chases him.
(I wasn’t quick enough to get a screen shot of the skeleton actually reaching the player.)
Once the Enemy reaches the player, Combat begins.
Now combat in the new Aldon’s Crossing will be completely redesigned. For now, I just have a little animation play and then bring up the new combat screen:

Which admittedly, doesn’t look like much right now. Pressing the Cancel button will cause the Player to just win the combat.
After the player wins, the Combat Screen closes and we see the skeleton die. He actually animates and falls apart, then his bones hang around for a bit before finally fading away:

That’s a screen grab of the skeleton falling apart.
In the future I might experiment with actually recording these because they look a LOT better in motion.
A couple of other things to notice is that the world now fills up the whole screen and we can draw GUI elements right on top of it and move them around.
Also on the tech development, Adam got sound effects and sound management into the engine. I can’t really take a screen grab of a sound playing, but here is a shot of the Debug Screen with the new Play Sound button:

Oh yeah, there is also a temporary Goblin art asset I found on the web that I am using to test the new combat states for the new Combat System in addition to a new visual effect sprite.
So things are going pretty darn smooth. It is a piece of cake to add new creatures, items, and objects to the game. The only hard part is creating art assets since neither Mike, Adam, or myself is an artist. True, I did all the art on the original Aldon’s Crossing, but we want to deliver a much more fulfilling visual experience this time around. For now these temporary art assets we are using allow us to continue with the development of the game.
Next I will begin to focus almost exclusively on the new combat system and all the supporting systems it will need.