Yes, that's good advice. Particuarly to start with the key areas and work outwards from those.
The starting areas are particularly tricky, since they should be interesting and good looking to get the player "hooked" to the game, but they must leave room so that other, later regions can be even more impressive.
I also think the first jewel should be fairly easy to get to, to give the player an easy start. Maybe just say the thief dropped it while running away from the temple and it rolled down a drain and likely is somewhere in the sewers now. Sewers are overdone, but this way the player can start adventuring without much travelling.
Side-quest: Get the jewel cleaned afterwards :D
Too much text is a problem. One of my former RPG attempts suffered from that. I thought that people like detailed item stats, but it turned out that there are limits. Thanks for reminding me!
Seems I can start now, the sewers idea will link the first dungeon directly to the starting village, so I can work on a new demo without too much overland design yet.
Thanks, this helped a lot :)
Does this forum have a reward system? I'd like to give you a +1 of sorts for your advice.
Diablo II was my main source of inspiration when I started this. Particularly the item system. But that has to go into another thread, when the project is ripe enough to be announced.
The black pixels come from the way I created the image. It was rendered with a black background, antialiased, and so the border is blended with black. I can remove it, but in this case it was intentional, because it gives the resulting display in the game a more crisp look. There was no color reduction involved.
I'm using PovRay, which creates textures procedurally. There were no other artists involved, the object is 100% my creation, and didn't need any additional images as textures.
For this object I don't want to relase the PovRay scene file, but I have some which I already had released a while ago, but which got lost when I took down my website. I'll re-publish them in a while. Currently digging through my graphics archives to see what to publish :)
I've been a bit puzzled by the ambush of questions, but well, if it helps :)
But actually I'm not asking a technical question, how to implement such a world. I'm just asking how to create the world itself, the idea, the map layout. Without any relation to programming, just like a classic RPG game master might draw a small continent or big island on paper, with the important places marked and notes for the areas in between.
I have a rough design of the starting location, the temple and the village. The map details for those are not final, but it's sure that these two places exists, and are close to each other.
I have a few ideas about the locations where the jewels will be hidden, but not of all 7 places yet. I've been asking in another forum for suggestions about hiding locations, but the results were meager. But I'll have to start with one location anyways, so I've got stuff to work on. One place will be a classic underground maze, the other will be a tower. I'm pondering about a pyramid and an ice castle as well. The other 3, I have no ideas yet.
The real question is, how to set up the overland area, so that it feels "right" to the player to start travelling from the village and finally reaching one of the secret locations. I wonder how far they should be apart, like, should it be hours of play time between, or rather 10 minutes, or even less? Should I map all the areas, or have magic transitions, like a character who "warps" the player to a secret location as a quest reward?
Technically, it's not a 3D project, it's isometric 2D. OpenGL is just a very efficient rendering engine, which I want to use for color blending effects. Java 2D is lacking in blending modes.
But should be irrelevant to the world design questions.
Edit: I think the idea to paint an island on paper and mark the locations will already answer the question. Lakes, rivers, mountains, forests, jungle, swamp, tribal villages, monster pits etc, I think the ideas will come easily once I actually have started. I just need to take care to keep everything in a reasonable scale to keep it doable.
I'm a programmer, and self-tought graphics artist. Game design and music/sound are my weakest skills, but usually I get things done there, too. I have a walkaround demo so far: http://sourceforge.net/projects/jewelhunt/
It's java, using LWJGL for OpenGL bindings. No special tools or frameworks.
Not sure why these questions are important to the world design problem?
The story is little more than I told already - The rainbow jewels which give the world the colors hzave been aduced from the temple of the rainbow colors by evil forces of gray. If the player can't retrieve the jewels in time, the world will bleach out and fade to gray.
As said, game design is not my best skill, and that's why I seek for help with that part. I'll also need help with graphics, but I felt it to be too early to ask for that.
I've also got a first version of the raindow temple art:
But actually I didn't want to talk so much about the project, because it's really just starting, and I wanted to discuss only the world design question - given the fact that 7 locations are needed, which the player has to discover, how does one approach world design? How to decide how big is "big enough"? Model a whole continent or just some selected areas, with magic transitions in between?
I'd assume the "old" approach to have rising monster difficulty, and at certain places boss monsters as special challenges works well. The player can advance as much as they want, and the bosses will make sure the player has some minimum abilities once the bosses are taken down and before the player can reach a new area.
Yes, that's good advice. Particuarly to start with the key areas and work outwards from those.
The starting areas are particularly tricky, since they should be interesting and good looking to get the player "hooked" to the game, but they must leave room so that other, later regions can be even more impressive.
I also think the first jewel should be fairly easy to get to, to give the player an easy start. Maybe just say the thief dropped it while running away from the temple and it rolled down a drain and likely is somewhere in the sewers now. Sewers are overdone, but this way the player can start adventuring without much travelling.
Side-quest: Get the jewel cleaned afterwards :D
Too much text is a problem. One of my former RPG attempts suffered from that. I thought that people like detailed item stats, but it turned out that there are limits. Thanks for reminding me!
Seems I can start now, the sewers idea will link the first dungeon directly to the starting village, so I can work on a new demo without too much overland design yet.
Thanks, this helped a lot :)
Does this forum have a reward system? I'd like to give you a +1 of sorts for your advice.
Diablo II was my main source of inspiration when I started this. Particularly the item system. But that has to go into another thread, when the project is ripe enough to be announced.
The black pixels come from the way I created the image. It was rendered with a black background, antialiased, and so the border is blended with black. I can remove it, but in this case it was intentional, because it gives the resulting display in the game a more crisp look. There was no color reduction involved.
I'm using PovRay, which creates textures procedurally. There were no other artists involved, the object is 100% my creation, and didn't need any additional images as textures.
For this object I don't want to relase the PovRay scene file, but I have some which I already had released a while ago, but which got lost when I took down my website. I'll re-publish them in a while. Currently digging through my graphics archives to see what to publish :)
I've been a bit puzzled by the ambush of questions, but well, if it helps :)
But actually I'm not asking a technical question, how to implement such a world. I'm just asking how to create the world itself, the idea, the map layout. Without any relation to programming, just like a classic RPG game master might draw a small continent or big island on paper, with the important places marked and notes for the areas in between.
I have a rough design of the starting location, the temple and the village. The map details for those are not final, but it's sure that these two places exists, and are close to each other.
I have a few ideas about the locations where the jewels will be hidden, but not of all 7 places yet. I've been asking in another forum for suggestions about hiding locations, but the results were meager. But I'll have to start with one location anyways, so I've got stuff to work on. One place will be a classic underground maze, the other will be a tower. I'm pondering about a pyramid and an ice castle as well. The other 3, I have no ideas yet.
The real question is, how to set up the overland area, so that it feels "right" to the player to start travelling from the village and finally reaching one of the secret locations. I wonder how far they should be apart, like, should it be hours of play time between, or rather 10 minutes, or even less? Should I map all the areas, or have magic transitions, like a character who "warps" the player to a secret location as a quest reward?
Technically, it's not a 3D project, it's isometric 2D. OpenGL is just a very efficient rendering engine, which I want to use for color blending effects. Java 2D is lacking in blending modes.
But should be irrelevant to the world design questions.
Edit: I think the idea to paint an island on paper and mark the locations will already answer the question. Lakes, rivers, mountains, forests, jungle, swamp, tribal villages, monster pits etc, I think the ideas will come easily once I actually have started. I just need to take care to keep everything in a reasonable scale to keep it doable.
I'm a programmer, and self-tought graphics artist. Game design and music/sound are my weakest skills, but usually I get things done there, too. I have a walkaround demo so far: http://sourceforge.net/projects/jewelhunt/
It's java, using LWJGL for OpenGL bindings. No special tools or frameworks.
Not sure why these questions are important to the world design problem?
The story is little more than I told already - The rainbow jewels which give the world the colors hzave been aduced from the temple of the rainbow colors by evil forces of gray. If the player can't retrieve the jewels in time, the world will bleach out and fade to gray.
As said, game design is not my best skill, and that's why I seek for help with that part. I'll also need help with graphics, but I felt it to be too early to ask for that.
I've also got a first version of the raindow temple art:
But actually I didn't want to talk so much about the project, because it's really just starting, and I wanted to discuss only the world design question - given the fact that 7 locations are needed, which the player has to discover, how does one approach world design? How to decide how big is "big enough"? Model a whole continent or just some selected areas, with magic transitions in between?
I'd assume the "old" approach to have rising monster difficulty, and at certain places boss monsters as special challenges works well. The player can advance as much as they want, and the bosses will make sure the player has some minimum abilities once the bosses are taken down and before the player can reach a new area.
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