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Main » Suggestion Box » Making the world more interesting
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Posted on 04-03-13, 05:59 am (revision 3)

 

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This is sort of a spiritual successor to my previous post about making towns feel more alive, but this time it's bit bigger in scope. There's also gonna be a bit of nitpicky stuff here too, but seeing as we're at the point nearing the next release, I feel that it's time to address some if it.


Major stuff:

Separation of monster and man:
The basic idea behind this is that we physically separate towns and wilderness areas in order to better differentiate them. I feel that towns should seem like places of safety and that wilderness areas should be more dangerous, and that the best way to get both of these extremes is to physically separate them into different travelable zones.

While towns wouldn't change much aside from monsters or dungeons not spawning around them anymore, the wilderness areas I was thinking of would be a bit like dungeons in that you couldn't fast travel while inside them. The obvious exception to this would be a starting "safe-board" where no monsters spawn and the PC is able to travel, but on any other boards in the wilderness area, monsters would spawn and the PC would not be able to travel.

Ultimately, I'd like to see these areas become forests, ravine networks, dead cities and the like, but for the time being we could use the same empty boards we've been using, just so we can test it and see if it's worth pursuing.


Edge board boundaries:
Another think I'd like to see is boards that are at the edge of a board cluster (ie. boards that don't have a connecting board on all four sides) having some kind of natural boundary. This serves a couple of purposes; one is that it shows the player which sides of the current board are connected to other boards just by looking at it, and the other is that it adds a stronger level visual differentiation to each of the boards and helps the player to keep track of where they are.

The way I was thinking this would work it that the boundaries are added to the all boards in a cluster after all the boards have been created, and that the boundary types would depend on the board type and biome. For instance, an open area board in a desert biome might have a boundary constructed of rocks or a cliff, while the same board type in a temperate biome would have a boundary made of trees. For the sake of simplicity and minimizing size, boundaries in towns could just be walls or fences of some kind.



Minor stuff:
<ul>
<li>Making item use take a turn: I'm suggesting this one mostly as a way to prevent players from just stocking up on food and then devouring a shitload of it any time their health gets low. Hopefully this will make combat a bit more tense.</li>
<li>Moving 'Trade' into the top level menu: Having trade hidden in the "Talk to" menu is a bit unintuitive, and I think that giving merchants an extra option at the top level interaction menu helps to set them apart from the other characters.</li>
<li>Reseting the position of the player character when they travel to another location: This could be done easily by setting the PC XY to the default one (i.e. the one from when they first start) each time they travel. The main reason I have for wanting this is that I hate getting stuck in lakes when I travel. >_< </li>
<li>Travel time: Adding a random amount of time to current time whenever the PC travels. This helps to give the impression that the PC is physically going somewhere else instead of just teleporting.</li>
<li>Giving the player indications of when the PC can't travel: I think that it might make things less confusing for the player if the game displayed a message when they tried to travel but were unable to, something like "You cannot travel from this location."</li>
</ul>

Lead writer on Noxico (and sometimes programmer or designer) <br>
Posted on 04-03-13, 08:27 am
<i>Prophet of Celestia</i><br>Baka on the streets, senpai in the sheets

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This is all very doable and sensible. In rough order of difficulty: trade as an action, travel denial, travel time, travel position, item time, boundaries, wilds. Those last two may be switched.

For board boundaries, the board's direction properties (Board.North et al) can be easily used to determine where to put the boundaries. I'd suggest having a bunch of tile definitions and PNGs for BoardDrawing's MergeBitmap() to work with -- one for each direction, a couple maybe, for each boundary type. Not all biomes need their own boundary sets -- a few could be shared. The only real problem I can see is that the boundary will most certainly clip into a building, unless CreateTown() is adjusted to ensure whatever shape the residential parts have, there's nothing around it.


There's just one other tiny little snag: characters with wings can "hop" fences and cross water and cliffs -- and then they drown or plummet when they run out of airtime, or try to land.

I don't just program Noxico...
Posted on 04-03-13, 02:06 pm

 

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I like the separation of towns and wilderness idea, but I also like the idea of having a wilderness associated with each town (so you could have events that link the two, for example saving some fair maiden who got lost or something)

I wonder if you could poke a hole in the town boundary, and then use that to pass into the wilderness area. It also avoids the need for a safe board in the wilderness, since you can just go back to the town to travel or whatever.
Posted on 04-03-13, 02:38 pm
<i>Prophet of Celestia</i><br>Baka on the streets, senpai in the sheets

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Actually, if a stretch of wilderness were to be connected to a town, before the entire location (cluster of connected boards) is bounded off, it's fairly trivial to tell that the board [dir] of town is wild, and vice versa, and add a gate to both sides.

In fact...



① Generate a town in some nice shape somehow. All boards must be connected!
② Generate wilderness in a similar manner.
③ Pick a direction (in this case north) and connect one of the northmost town boards with one of the southmost wild boards. Add a gate to both.
④ Attach farmland and other such special parts to the town. The town point it attaches to can be chosen by the presence of NPCs with [role/farmer].
⑤ Bound off all the boards we've made for this location so far.

The cool thing is that if there are several "northmost" town boards and one is chosen, the others do not connect in a northerly direction and get bounded, even though there's (equally south-bounded) wilderness right there.

I don't just program Noxico...
Posted on 04-03-13, 05:06 pm

 

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I actually like this solution better as it'll keep the number of travel locations down. One other thing I would like to suggest then is generating pathways that go between boards - sort of like what the demon portal has. You could use these to connect different town boards together and to show the player how to get to wilderness areas from towns.

Lead writer on Noxico (and sometimes programmer or designer) <br>
Posted on 04-03-13, 05:08 pm
<i>Prophet of Celestia</i><br>Baka on the streets, senpai in the sheets

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I don't get it, but thanks.

I don't just program Noxico...
Posted on 04-03-13, 05:21 pm

 

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I guess I should have been more clear. What I mean was adding dirt pathways or roads to the boards and having them match up with adjacent boards.

For example, if two town boards are right next to each other, and are surrounded by open boards on all other sides, the town board on the left would generate a dirt road that went to the edge of the board only on the right side, and conversely, the right town board would generate a road that goes to the edge only on the left side.

These roads could also be generated in open boards as well, but would contain roads that lead to towns or to wilderness areas.

Lead writer on Noxico (and sometimes programmer or designer) <br>
Posted on 04-03-13, 05:24 pm
<i>Prophet of Celestia</i><br>Baka on the streets, senpai in the sheets

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I have something planned regarding roads (also bodies of water) that doesn't use (but does account for) the template system. It should be easy enough to add edge points and maybe allow them to be further from the others.

I don't just program Noxico...
Posted on 04-03-13, 08:46 pm


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Having a space devoted to edge conditions might be a good time to select a space to represent stepping across the map. The click-to-navigate is very good, but doesn't let you travel to the next board, and this could be a time to implement that.

-Crissa
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