I've uploaded a playtest for everyone to try (absolutely free of charge of course). It includes 3 areas from the game (one unfinished), with a single enemy to kill. There are some items scattered about which the player can test as well.

Enemies and Inventory

Essentially this release shows off the current code I have for the enemies (basically they can only die right now). Besides real-life events, a big factor in the hiatus I took was because I wasn't exactly sure how I would code the enemies and bullets to work together. I also wanted to clean up the code for the inventory management, because previously it was creating a separate instance of the class I was storing inventory values in for both weapons and items. Finally I figured out how to have bullets and enemies communicate with each other, and I also created a single instance of the inventory which the weapons and items menus could just read from. Because nothing major was changed, everything continued operating as intended.

Currently enemies can be shot at, and if you punch them 3 times, they die as well. I'm having some trouble getting ration drops to work, but I figure I'll find a way to do it eventually.

BGM

My plan is to reuse music from the Konami SCC era on MSX for MG:Foxhound. One of the key features of any MG/MGS game is the awesome music in each title. I didn't want to simply reuse music from MG2, as much as I love it, but I wanted to keep the exact same style. SD Snatcher and the original Snatcher (both on the MSX) use Konami SCC and thus have a very similar musical style to MG2. The music from Snatcher fits quite well also, and I'm pretty satisfied with using this music permanently, although I might switch over to original music using an SCC tracker or something.

The Future

Of course, the Flash platform is going to be defunct as of December 2020, meaning I'd need to provide a Flash installation with the game if I decide to keep going with the Actionscript/Flash platform. As such I've been toying with the idea of using another platform to develop the game, but I just can't get used to any game development software that I've tried (Game Maker Studio, Clickteam Fusion, Unity). I would like to just write the entire game from scratch with a minimalist IDE or without an IDE, which honestly wouldnt be that difficult seeing as it's a relatively simple 2D game, but it also seems like a colossal task. The futher I develop the game in actionscript 3, the more I think I'd be wasting progress trying to switch everything over to a more conventional language such as C++ or C#, which also keeps me from wanting to start over. Only time will tell what I end up deciding.