Day 2

I have made some good progress today, and also hit my first significant snag.

On the positive side, I've been able to write the code to load in the levels from a Json format, and they have all or most of the information they need to do that.  I've also got the tiles loading from Json as well.  This was something I had hoped to do last year, but didn't get a chance to do, so I'm excited about it this year.

Unfortunately, I've hit a pretty significant snag.  I'm using libtcod for the graphics, which is generally pretty convenient, but libtcod uses a bitmap font sheet, and I'm planning on adding custom characters for things like the robots and the conveyor belts.  I've already created a custom font sheet that supports many unicode characters (I did that a few years ago after I got tired of some of the non-standard mappings the default font uses).  I was anticipating that libtcod would have a nice convenient way to update that sheet with new characters at runtime, so that I can have my custom characters in a separate file and just dynamically add them to the character palate.  Unfortunately, that does not seem to be the case.

At this point, I'm left with two choices:

1. Make a custom version of my unicode font sheet with the custom characters included, and sacrifice my hopes of being able to easily add in new tiles.
2. Figure something out with image manipulation to merge the new characters onto my font sheet before initializing libtcod.

I'm probably going to end up going with #1 without wasting too much more time on things, but I'm going to sleep on it before I make a final decision.  Hopefully I'll be able to make some more good progress tomorrow afternoon, after getting home from church!