...so I'll just give you a quick status update concerning the RPG. I've had the actual story mode system finished for several months now, but as of two days ago, the battle system was incomplete as all hell. As of today, however, I've got that squared away, including the enemy AI. I'm pretty proud of it all together, but the AI is what I'm really, really happy with. It uses a fuzzy logic decision mechanism that takes into account the player's statistical ability and the computer character's strengths and weaknesses and generates a random -- yet intelligent -- action.

I intentionally left out a few things from the code to make the computer easier to beat, since the first version of the AI kicked my ass 9.5 times out of 10...and I'm its daddy. I figured the game wouldn't be too much fun if every fight were life-and-death, so I lobotomized the code a bit. I think it hits a good balance right now.

I still have some minor nice-ities to throw in, and I still need to decide how I want to the player to go about getting items ( should I give them out randomly after a battle or put in a 'shop'? ), but overall I've got the coding finished. I'm all set to move onto the fun part: graphics. As the game stands now from a graphical perspective, its pure crap, but hopefully I can remedy all that by Halloween, the current projected release date.

As a side note, I'm currently searching for songs to pad the game's soundtrack, so if you know of any heavy metal / punk rock tracks that sound kinda gothic, send them my way