Overdue Update

Sadly, I've been lazy with my updates to this development journal.  It's been a month and a half since the last update and I've made a lot of progress that I'll now try to summarize. In this update I'll talk about:

• Tiled Maps
• Game Progress
• Helpful Resources

Tiled Maps

I decided to use Tiled Map Editor to create my game maps.  On top of Tiled being free and very easy to use, Libgdx has built-in support for rendering maps create with Tiled.  I did run into a major hang up though.

My game is based on a grid of hexagonal tiles, which the main version of Tiled does not currently support.  After some Googling though, I tracked down a branch does. You can find it here; at the time of this post, that branch is fairly up to date with the main development branch of Tiled.

Game Progress

I spent about a week stubbing out the majority of the game's framework, only implementing methods that were trivial, and writing TODO comments for everything else.  Then I began tackling the list of about fifty tasks that had accumulated in the process.  Each task ranges anywhere from half-an-hour to a week's worth of work. The list is not exhaustive, and I'm still adding tasks as I work.
Here's a list of the high level tasks I've completed so far (in order):

1. Stubbed out the game's framework
2. Import and display maps created with Tiled
3. Code for adding/removing towers to/from the map
4. Implemented a state machine to handle user input and execute the resulting commands
5. Implemented the A* pathfinding algorithm for army movement

From a high level perspective there isn't a whole lot left to do until the game mechanics are fully implemented.  My next step will then be to start work on the AI which will be a huge challenge since I have no prior experience in AI programming.
Here's a screen shot of what the game looks like after a few clicks (it looks pretty bad, but that is to be expected at this stage).

Useful Resources

Here's a list of the resources I've found extremely useful in the last few weeks. 

• Artificial Intelligence For Games - this book was recommended to me by a very experienced AI developer.

• /r/gamedev - general game development talk

• Amit's Blog - Amit Patel writes some amazing game dev tutorials. I found his hexagonal grid, and pathfinding tutorials helpful.

• PixelProspector's Indie Guide - an amazing list of resources for indie developers, covering art, music, marketing, and a lot more.

• Art Portfolios - Unfortunately I am not artistically talented.  I'll probably need to contract an artist, so I've been keeping an eye on this forum.  I've seen some really talented artists post here.

• /r/gameDevClassifieds - I've also found some good artists here.

• /r/gameAssets - links free game assets