Little Improvements. I've been very busy this past month and so I haven't had time to add much. I did get a bit of free time to make a few of the improvements I wanted to make.
Navigation arrows are now working!
I was surprised just how much easier these made travelling the maps, without taking away from exploration. I need to make a few adjustments, but otherwise they work very well. Arrows flash if they point to an unexplored room, and are solid color if they point to a room the player has already been in before. There is also a different blinking pattern if the arrows point to an exit to another map.
I added code to remove arrows from secret rooms, but now I have to go back and flag all of the secret rooms as such. I also need to not show exits that are completely in the dark. The game is a mostly third person limited point-of-view: the player shouldn't see anything that Marika couldn't see. There are some exceptions, of course. Marika must have a really good memory to be able to perfectly recall which rooms she has been in. I didn't want to go so far to integrate the navigation arrows with the intelligence character stat, so we'll just assume she has a photogenic memory.
The bigger thing I've been working on is saving. This has proven to be a significant endeavor. I have writing to file working. I just need to finish loading. Once I get that all working, I can remove Marika's immortality. This will make it a lot easier to gauge how difficult the game is.
I made the save points ankh statues--a little nod to the original "Temple of Idosra" which used ankh statues for healing. The original game used diskette statues for saving, but that's a little too out of character.
The first ankh statue is near the starting point of the game, but is behind a locked door so that it taunts the player

I wanted to pique their curiosity early--what is that shimmering thing? You need the bronze key to open the door, which is buried deep in the map. I might change it to a new key that is easier to get, though. I don't want the player to have to wait too long to use a save, since otherwise they'll have to start over if they die.