Working on the first zone...

I decided a good way to gain traction is to set a pretty clear (and attainable) goal - ideally something that helps progress the "game" side of this project rather than just more engine tweaks.  To that end I've started piecing together the basics of a multi-level dungeon with a simple progression of environment, creatures, and at some point loot.  Thus begins the first goblin caves adventure...

Of course I ran into a bit of a snag when I started writing the class definition for zones, specifically trying to lock down what a zone needs to know and how best to represent it.  Ultimately I decided to take the approach of writing the zone data in whatever way seemed natural, and then worked backwards to turn that into C++ definitions.  That of course exposed some limitations of my data file format/parsing that I'll definitely want to revisit soon, but for now it'll get the job done.