I whipped up an overhead game demo with an 8 point rotation actor and some areas on a map with physical response. The view follows the actor if he gets too close to the edge of the view. The are no world boundaries, so you can walk off into the inky blackness if you want to.
I'm going to use this as the basis for some further experiments, but I'm sharing it in case someone finds it helpful as a basic demo.
I borrowed a great modern map image from the dundjinni map forums. I'm only using this rez'd up image to make the demo look more interesting while the actor is wandering around bumping into wireframes.
The actor animations are just something I put together with Basic 2D Character Sprite Kit. The 45 degree rotations look really bad with artifacts but it's a placeholder while I work out some details on other stuff. At least you can tell the guy is walking around, right?