- Joined
- April 17, 2007
- Messages
- 5,749
I thought it would be interesting to have a thread about designing a blob based world for an rpg. I have had some time to sit down and think of ways I would like to change the way they have been done in the past to make them more modern, ie using a bit more computing power to provide a better overall game experience.
I am not a programmer, well at least not anymore and my skills were decidedly average then. This is just some brainstorming for fun as I like designing in general and I hope this will get some discussion going.
Now, we have seen a resurgence with blobbers to an extent with M&M, Eliminage Gothic, Sword and sorcery and grimrock as well as some others I am forgetting. But we really haven't seen anything that wasn't done before.
What I was thinking about for my first thread on this was talking about general overworld game design.
In my mind it would be interesting to have a over world akin to what we saw in Bard's tale 2 back in the day, but lets take that and make it more interactive. Lets add some variables to each land section to allow changing seasons and weather.
Now, you may ask why bother with that? I think it adds the ability to make the game much more immersive in the fact that you have more variables to consider for combat, magic and gear.
Now lets slow this down a bit and think about how this would work. I was thinking of graphing a world out by tiles, which is an obvious choice for this type of game because you step from tile to tile. Now, you would need to generate a rather large overworld to give it a believable feel. Imagine a world akin to an ultima that is well thought out and tiled like this. This could work and I would want to make this a bit more complicated then a static map.
I am going to draw a basic tile layout for a small area as an example...each X will be a tile like this:
XXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXX
There you have a basic tile layout now, lets add some (T)trees the same layout and a couple of mountains(M)
TXXTXXTXM
XXTXXXXMM
TTXXXXXXM
XXTTXXXXX
XXXXXXXXX
Ok I think you get the basic layout of a tile map...but that's not all I was thinking. I was thinking what if we added seasonal information to each tile. What if it is summer then it is green....the fall yellow and winter it changes to snow. It is important that this not only be graphically represented but also actually show stat differences. For instance if there is snow, the characters better have a cold resistance greater then the cold damage of the area or take damage, also, if they are wearing heavy clothing then perhaps it affects their to hit rolls.
Looking at this it would be a lot of manual entering to get a word that would change with the seasons but I think it is doable with a global variable for time that the game would use to check against when loading those segments.
This does not have to be limited to snow either, this could also work in the opposite to allow for spreading desert.
So that's great, we have a world now that has snow, tress and mountains. Sounds pretty boring.
This is where the next stage of the design would take place, such as towns and dungeons. I have some ideas for those but I thought I would throw out these ideas to see if anyone is interested in talking general game design.
I am not a programmer, well at least not anymore and my skills were decidedly average then. This is just some brainstorming for fun as I like designing in general and I hope this will get some discussion going.
Now, we have seen a resurgence with blobbers to an extent with M&M, Eliminage Gothic, Sword and sorcery and grimrock as well as some others I am forgetting. But we really haven't seen anything that wasn't done before.
What I was thinking about for my first thread on this was talking about general overworld game design.
In my mind it would be interesting to have a over world akin to what we saw in Bard's tale 2 back in the day, but lets take that and make it more interactive. Lets add some variables to each land section to allow changing seasons and weather.
Now, you may ask why bother with that? I think it adds the ability to make the game much more immersive in the fact that you have more variables to consider for combat, magic and gear.
Now lets slow this down a bit and think about how this would work. I was thinking of graphing a world out by tiles, which is an obvious choice for this type of game because you step from tile to tile. Now, you would need to generate a rather large overworld to give it a believable feel. Imagine a world akin to an ultima that is well thought out and tiled like this. This could work and I would want to make this a bit more complicated then a static map.
I am going to draw a basic tile layout for a small area as an example...each X will be a tile like this:
XXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXX
There you have a basic tile layout now, lets add some (T)trees the same layout and a couple of mountains(M)
TXXTXXTXM
XXTXXXXMM
TTXXXXXXM
XXTTXXXXX
XXXXXXXXX
Ok I think you get the basic layout of a tile map...but that's not all I was thinking. I was thinking what if we added seasonal information to each tile. What if it is summer then it is green....the fall yellow and winter it changes to snow. It is important that this not only be graphically represented but also actually show stat differences. For instance if there is snow, the characters better have a cold resistance greater then the cold damage of the area or take damage, also, if they are wearing heavy clothing then perhaps it affects their to hit rolls.
Looking at this it would be a lot of manual entering to get a word that would change with the seasons but I think it is doable with a global variable for time that the game would use to check against when loading those segments.
This does not have to be limited to snow either, this could also work in the opposite to allow for spreading desert.
So that's great, we have a world now that has snow, tress and mountains. Sounds pretty boring.
This is where the next stage of the design would take place, such as towns and dungeons. I have some ideas for those but I thought I would throw out these ideas to see if anyone is interested in talking general game design.
- Joined
- Apr 17, 2007
- Messages
- 5,749