I've finished the version of my rain/city map. I call it DM-FeatureCreep. I've had one friend play test the level near completion and just had another friend play test the final version. He gave me a couple of small things to change and I've gone ahead and changed those. I've been having problems cook the map so I had to use one of those friends' computer to cook it. The only problem is that he is running the game without the version 1.3 patch, and, when I try to play on my computer, the game shuts down for some reason. This may relate to the previous problem of not being able to cook the map, though.

I've also been thinking of a concept of light up shoes. I know there are already shoes such as the pair of L.A. lights that I had when I was a kid, that flashed red when the wearer steps down, but I am thinking of a more adult and futuristic version. When the user steps down, white light turns on in a line until the whole bottom of the shoe is lit. If the wearer stands in one place for a duration of time -- say, 15 seconds -- the light would, to conserve energy, blink in a pre-programmed pattern and then fade out. I was thinking that this would be a cool dynamic to a survival/horror game where everything is usually under lit. Light could be use to harm or scare away monsters, such as vampires, and so that enemies couldn't get too close to the player (unless they stand still too long :) ).
To execute this, I would plan on connecting a dynamic white light to each foot bone and running a test so that the light would only turn on if the foot was flatly colliding with another collision box (this way, if a player where to kick something or jump next to a wall (and there foot happened to brush against it), the shoe would NOT light up. It would light, though, if the player managed to do a running back flip off a wall or while jumping platforms, etc. I will be coming up with a few concept sketches in a later post.