Making a Map

Good evening everyone,

So sorry for the break between posts. My goal is to have these weekly so I will try harder on being more consistent. Work is still moving along on DR and the Demo. While making maps for the demo, and as I think I mentioned before, I thought it could be interesting to show how a map is built from the ground up. This is just an example of the map making, not the event creation which is a much larger process. Perhaps I can have Rob write a quick post on making a neat event. I will see what I can do.

Well to start, we open the program and name it and end up with a clean slate that looks a bit like this.

So in this case I named our map "Cabin" which for now is where the first scene of the demo takes place. As you can see there is part of the map in the upper left that starts off with a default tile. The outer blue squares are blank space for now because we haven't tiled them yet. If you were to start this in the game you would just have the floor tiles you see and black space everywhere else. Right now the games default "Starting Player" is set in the middle of the map. That will be changed but that is a post for later.

Here is usually where I build the structure of the house. Since it is a cabin I went with a wood theme. These are just the "bones" of an interior. Next we will dress it up.

Well, the map still isn't looking like much at this point. We just have an empty room. Now we actually start work on making the map look like something that resembles something that looks like it could be lived in. The beginning of the demo will have our players sitting at a table so that was the first thing I focused on.

This is a relatively simple map, we have much more complex ones in the game. The reason this is a simpler map is because I am not sure how much the player will see on the right hand side of the map. I still like to make what I consider "complete" maps though that someone could live in regardless of what is seen. In addition to that I knew I wanted to make this post so I wanted a full map to show.

Some things that come into consideration when making a map in my mind are "does this map make sense cohesively" and "can you easily navigate the map". For instance a book case in the middle of the rug wouldn't make sense from a cohesive standpoint and it would be a pain to run around every time you were there. That may seem like an obvious example but it is just one of many thoughts put into trying to make an enjoyable experience. This map does not have any events on it yet but I hope when you see it running in the demo it is an exciting scene!

Good night everyone.

JP