Update 4: Combat!
Some major major important progress was made since the last post, but with almost nothing to "show" for it: coding cleanup. Everything is now in objects and much, much better organised. Better functions have been written, so now instead of having gatherwheat(amount), gatherwood(amount), gatherstone(amount), etc. I just have gatherresouce(Resource, amount). Likewise, things like increasing or decreasing your "workforce" is simply handled within a single changeworkers(Resource, amount) function, which can accept positive numbers to increase or negative numbers to decrease assigned workers.
There's other major structural improvement from using objects was giving them a "flagShow" property. The game now entirely automatically determines whether stuff like resources and upgrades appear or hidden depending on that property. There's also a special "Game.Flags.Visible.(...)" object - If I add a property with the same name as an HTML element, it will automatically show/hide that element, overriding the relevant object (if one exists). This means I can also tweak specific stuff for story purposes when needed, but leave everything else to the automatic handling.
Still, I wanted to have something visible to show, so I added something a little more fun: combat!
The absolute most basic text-based RPG combat. But combat nevertheless.
You can engage a monster, and take turns gentlemanly-like punching each other until one drops. You can get XP and level up, though this doesn't mean much yet. If you die, you wake up in the fields with HP restored and can go in again for another round.
Next: inventory
The first stage of the game, the "incremental" resource gathering, is now pretty fleshed out. You can gather resources, upgrade your gathering equipment, meet two strangers who become allocatable workers, upgrade the farm itself, and finally, explore and find a cave, which unlocks stone, and on further explanation, iron ore, and eventually, opens up into the dungeon where you can fight the endless parade of skeletons.
Next may be the hardest part of all - a working inventory system. Lots of elements needed for that - windows to display lists of gear, adding and adjusting the list as items are equipped, dropped, sold, etc. The game needs to know who has what equipped, and what stats it should boost. Usable consumable items. Tooltips showing stats of items so players can compare equipment choices. Probably the most work needed in the entire game!