I decided to give up on the isometry because I wasn’t really getting anything done. I have gone back to using a 2d map instead.|

• The map is made with the Tiled Map Editor (https://thorbjorn.itch.io/tiled) and saved as a JSON file.
  • Tiled is good for visually building maps but a pain to work with. I’d much rather write a map editor from scratch, genuinely. I might do it at some point, honestly.
  • The map is actually split up into 3 layers: the ground, where turrets can be placed; the path tiles, where enemies will walk; and the path polygon, which is a line that the enemies will follow. This allows me to have separate path and ground groups which will simplify turret-path collisions later. In theory, I will be able to make the enemies follow the polygon, too.
  • I had to write a whole function just to parse the map JSON files. It organizes the layers into a dictionary of keys and 2-dimensional Numpy arrays. For the path polygon, it converts it from a list of dicts to tuples. It also removes any other inconsistencies with the original file and only keeps the important stuff.
• I made the map bigger than the screen itself so that it is draggable. The checks for boundaries are kind of buggy but it’ll do for now. This was just a matter of keeping a variable to track if the map is being dragged, keeping an offset, checking for boundaries, and checking for mouse movements.

I know this was kind of a setback, but real progress can be made now!