I have a whole lot of code that does in some way what I want it to but it's by no means organized to be able to intentionally create different levels yet. Layering still doesn't work quite right and I have no way to descend into the caves below. Even if I had some kind of stairway, I don't think my code could support moving around there at all since I added in the trees. Also, not really sure if the frame rate being displayed is at all accurate. But what bothers me the most right now is that I have what I think is a really bad flicker on the trees which is especially noticeable in the winter scenes.
I could use some advise on the flicker problem. Right now, everything is just blt to a back buffer every frame and then the final result is blt to the screen. I'm not expecting the trees to change much though there will be the ability to chop them down or perhaps for a quantity of them to become fallen due to an area of effect spell. If anyone can suggest some techniques to look into, it'd be appreciated.
I think that this happens because of the very high contrast between close pixels (almost white snow vs almost black tree).
I would try to use a limited color palette, maybe an analogic (3 base colors) color scheme for the winter scene around a bluish, desatured color, something like this, and then recolor your scene from this color scheme.