I spent some time to fix the speed issues and bring things back to a playable state. While the game doesn't run exactly how it did under Allegro, it's running at a speed that I think is definitely workable. I tossed a test demo out into the wild and so far there are no major issues. The shearing is reportedly gone, which is great news to my ears.

With that stuff squared away I am now beginning to get back into design mode. There are a lot of holes in my design right now, and I'd really like to get that squared away before I move forward with development. This project is a lot larger than anything I've worked on by myself so far. I want to pin down all of the major design details before I end up having feature creep get the best of me.

The first thing that is on my list of todos is to come up with the last 3 of the 8 races that will inhabit the game world. Right now it's really difficult to come up with anything at all. My suspicion is that because I am actively thinking about it, I'm actually preventing myself from coming up with some good material. More often than not, this sort of thing just hits you when you least expect it. I'm waiting for that moment where, magically, three races come to mind and they fit perfectly into the game world.

Somewhat related, I've also grown so accustomed to the main character sprite that I intend to have the main character be a robot. The backstory regarding this is, obviously, still in development!