Added day and night cycle, with further tweaks to make the night less dark; also added auto-sleep at 10pm for both player and creatures.

Then I went on to work in the forest rendering; the first change was making trees bigger, 2 tiles high so that the player could have a better feeling of scale. But even so there was an issue with the forest blobs: I needed to fill the gaps between them so that it felt like a packed forest instead of individiaul trees. I did some initial efforts with 9-slice auto-tile systems, but their scale and volume felt a bit off.

I tried to fix them by using a 47 tiles blob system which accounted for different cases of cornering and had three layers with different rendering logic but, in the end, didn’t really look nice.

I was freaking out thinking I’d have to take the helm and generate the 47 tiles tile system manually, but instead decided to drop the entire idea and instead just render the now bigger trees plus a tree in the middle of two adjacent trees.

I think that was a great call, it looks perfect to me and it really simplified rendering too.

I’m also re-considering the “1:1 scale” idea. Or at least how it should work… maybe I’ll keep it but make “rooms” a fixed size in tiles (so in a big screen you’d see a LOT of rooms. (but then that means I will no longer be able to ensure the map is contained within the display always, maybe I’d have to add some “hard scrolling”, shifting the offset of the top-left room. I think gigantic rooms are just very hard to warrant fun navigation, as much as I try to fill them with interesting stuff.