Project 500

[Ellie]

I am creating a project thread for this project so that I don't clog up the screenshots thread, but it's very early days at the moment. Basically:

What is the game?

The game takes place in the skies above a world. You play as a wizard, riding a sky lizard, in a blizzard, eating gizzard with Eddie Izzard.

The actual gameplay is simple. I'd put it somewhere between Project Grid (Jason/Tuna) and World of Warplanes, though severely simpler than both. Basically you fly around and shoot things while getting shot at.

The main purpose of the game is the scenery that you fly over (that you can partially interact with - by dropping "bombs" on and other shenanigans).

What form's this thread going to take?

I shall merely be updating with my mapping as it comes through.

The map is 500x500 in size, and the project is just an excuse to do so, creating a huge world and filling it with stuff. I want every inch to be intrinsically detailed and it is going to take a lot of work.

At present nothing is sufficiently detailed, I just have a couple of focal points mapped out. (Which isn't good, as I don't WANT focal points. I want any part of the map to be pickable and seen as a focal point. It should all be perfect.)

Got screenshots?

Water mill house on the frontier of some battle or somesuch.

Hamlet around a port with it's own church. The water is not done, placeholders for now.

You can of course see how unsatisfactory everything currently is by zooming out.

Very early into this project.

 

[Spoo]

I suppose it's an interesting idea, at least. I'm pretty much always skeptical of action-oriented games made in RMXP.

TBQH at the moment it sounds like an excuse to design a beautiful, large map, and that's something I'm a-okay with.

 

[Ellie]

Basically, yeah.

At the moment I'm just laying down the geography and such, and some basic elements on top of that, to get the main map down, and then I'll detail it. Having a bit of trouble transitioning from snow to grass though.

Might have overdone the ice...

 

[Perihelion]

Instead of having the sharp divide between the grass and the snow, maybe have patches interspersed so it's sort of dithered? You might also want some roads in the towns.

Looking good so far! Good luck with this. 500x500 is really big, though. Have you considered maybe starting with just one corner or something so you can cut it down if you get bored of making such a huge map?

 

[Injury]

Whenever I make something this size, I always look at Dragon's Destiny by Rast Blackwing for inspiration.

His maps are very detailed, I know they are from old tilesets, but they rock!

I will show one of my maps I worked on back in the day in the Screenshot Thread

 

[Ellie]

On roads: I'm going to make a tileset add-on soon for this. The rtp and everything a available doesn't cut it, there's perfect roads and there's dirt tracks, but nothing believably inbetween.

 

[Ellie]

So this is what I meant with the roads. I'm not sure I'm going to release it as a tileset though because it takes a lot of fiddly detail to get it to look right, you can't just slap it down and be done with it.

 

[Perihelion]

Oh, that looks cool. It might look good with some bare dirt layered under the loose pieces, too.

 

[Injury]

I really don't know if you care or not, but here is a world map from when I was like 16 or something...I miss working on this game, long nights of playing midi files to get pumped up!

Spoiler

 

[Ellie]

Looks good to me. I just love working on this kind of thing, it's frustrating to begin with but as areas start to come together and merge as one giant world it's so satisfying.

 

[Injury]

hell yea it is! I'm going to look at some of Rast's maps in a bit...I love big maps with great detail!

 

[Allen2014]

Looked like is a very huge project, just the 500*500 map operation may be difficult, the game experience will be much lower, (PS: I don't know what I Is it right? Really understand Amy's post)

 

[Ellie]

Running such a large map out of the box would cause lag but there are many ways of implementing it to decrease that lag. Ill be looking into.it properly once the map is done, but such things as loading content as you get to it could work, and not updating things out of scope.