Work continues. 

I recently added a teleport mechanic. You drop a crop circle anywhere on the ground excluding trees and water, and if you hit a button you teleport back to that spot. The obvious thing to do is put a crop circle right by the mothership and use it to teleport back when collecting items, but there could be other uses for it like a puzzle or something. Right now the animation for dropping a crop circle is the same as abducting some one but I stretch the light texture and force the UFO to a high elevation. The circle appearing out of no where looks kinda cool already, but I might want to try my hand at fancier animation/particles.

I made all the houses and building sprites one third bigger. They went from 64 to 96 pixels square. I had to make yet another tile map to fit a bigger image. and 96 pixels kinda messed up some lines so I had to touch up a bunch, but now the ratio of NPC size to house size looks way better.

I also added a compass to the top left of the screen. It has x and y coordinates based on the position of the mothership. I just implemented this for fun. I might turn off the icons that get marked on the map, and you will have to find items based on x y coords, but that might be too obtuse. I was thinking you could get a mission that just gives you xy coords and you would have to find a certain item that way.

With all these additions and changes I think the look of the game is starting to shape up. Next thing I need to do is look into behavior trees and really complicated stuff to make the AI better without breaking the rest of the code. Anyway these posts are mostly for my own reference, but if anyone has ideas they are more than welcome to hit me up.