Thanks Jer!
AUGUST UPDATE...
Edit: Here's a video of the map in action:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RADSukQ2PLI
I'm making a lot of progress and still feel on track to finish this year, depending on what the fall brings.
Major features I've brought into the game over the last few weeks:
A map
Accessible via the inventory, the map allows the player to a) fast travel to certain locations discovered over the course of the game and b) have a bird's-eye, accurate view of the world at large. This was important (and challenging!) for me to implement, because Malkin has a lot of small areas that make intuitive navigation really difficult. I made the map by taking screenshots of individual areas and mockups of areas yet to be made, stitched them together in GIMP (see below), and traced the PC's main routes in white.
Then, I hid the map layers and transferred the routes an image of graph paper, which allowed me to copy the route to scale to paper and produce the watercolor rendering, with most of the map (except the special mountain area) represented in full.
I had some intense scripting to do to make the map work as I wanted it to. These are the map's final features, as well as things I need to keep track of as I proceed:
1. If you're underground, indoors, in combat, or having certain plot interactions, the map can't work.
2. You can fast travel to certain locations in the forest (landmarks) that you discover as you travel, but you can't travel to those locations if you're at those locations or merely one area away from those locations.
3. When you're on the map, you appear as a pointer. (And when you're not using the map, you appear as normal.)
4. You can't use the map right after transitioning from one area to another. I found that this broke the map script I was relying on.
5. When you're on the map, time freezes.
6. The world map is broken into different zones, and traveling from one zone to another takes a certain amount of game time. But if your character has the Woodcraft trait, fast traveling takes less time. So I needed all fast travel transitions from the map to calculate the travel time between the starting zone and the destination zone.
7. Meanwhile, global ints were needed in the game world to keep track of characters' zones.
8. You have to be able to put the map away.
Combat triggers
I've made combat more interactive by including triggers for things like high grass (+2 AC, -50% Fire Resistance), higher ground (+2 Attack Bonus), and swamp (-2 AC, -50% Cold/Electricity Resistance) in battle. I've also added tons of items to the game, and most of the game's battles have a treasure trigger that gives randomized treasure across several different tiers of treasure tables.
More spells
The witch now has a wide variety of spells to choose from (currently 17) -- the goal is 20, so all the rows are filled!
Main quest
Most of the dialogs for the main story are in the game. This week I intend to finish them.