In thinking about the world layout I can't help but put myself into a situation where I feel that I need to whip up some tile-sets in order to mimic what the world areas might look like. As I mentioned in my previous post, it's very hard to draw a layout when in a 2D game world everything is "on top of" itself and there is no depth. You can only have stuff in the up, down, left, and right directions. While drawing things out I find this rather limited. If I had some tilesets, even with rudimentary tiles, I could take them and lay them out in an image editor to see how the world map might eventually look (based on what I drew previously). That said, coming up with even a few tiles for each world area would probably take someone with my skill quite a while. I have created some directory structure for where the tilesets will eventually live, but getting down to the actual drawing part... well, that's another story!

I have also kept myself from making a sprite form of the two races I have yet to do mockups for. I think I'm going to leave them be for the time being, and potentially just fill them in with stick figures. I don't want to put a whole super-amount of detail into the sprites if they are just going to be replaced. I have this really bad habit of putting a lot of work into things that I'm eventually just going to throw out! I already know for sure that one of the races I actually did make a sprite for is definitely going to go. It looks horrendous.

Ultimately, it's been a slow week. I was hoping that with the recent surge of motivation I had in coming up with the last races, mockups, etc, I'd be getting back on the daily roll of putting work into the game. Unfortunately, that hasn't been the case. While I spend a lot of time thinking about the things I'd like to do, I'm not spending time actually doing them. There are a lot of tasks remaining to be done in terms of design. What this really calls for a is a new breakdown of the bigger picture and the creation of a mini-task list.

There's nothing like a task list to help set things in motion.

I took a quick swipe at the initial world layout in hand-drawn form. I didn't realize how hard it would be until I finally came to grips with the fact that I was trying to draw could never be placed properly on a flat 2D map-space. That is, I was hand-drawing something that could be mapped to a globe. Unfortunately, in a strict two-dimensional tile-based map world, you cannot have forests that are placed "below" caves. That simply wouldn't make sense. In the 2D tile world, if you've gone into caves that are "underground", anything "lower" than that point is still underground! You cannot magically be above ground! Well, technically you could since it's a game world, but I want my game world to be slightly realistic.

With those considerations in mind, I drew things as spread out horizontally as I could, to mimic how things would appear for the in-game maps. I was able to incorporate most of the areas that I have designed, but a few were fairly small. I will most likely come back to this layout and tweak it a bit to make sure that all interesting areas get their fair share of screen time. In addition to that, I need to think about how the progression of areas will occur. Some areas will be blocked off at the start of the game, so coming up with how the game flow will work is very important. I want the player to be able to explore most of the world, with some areas locked off until after they have performed certain tasks. This way, if the player has already visited an area, next time they come back and have unlocked a new path there will be new and exciting things to experience there.

I also realized that in order to do any sprite work regarding the new races, I'd need to know how big things are in comparison to the player sprite. I whipped up a quick little hand-drawn image to scale things out a bit which included the player and all 8 races. For the most part, the initial sketches I did of each race were pretty spot on in terms of what their size should be in terms of the player. This new sketch really solidified things, though. With the size stuff down, I started making very generic sprites of each of the races. I have 6 down so far, two of which require a lot more work to even pass as programmer's art.

Taking the so-far complete sprites and recreating what I could of the size comparison drawing with them was pretty fun. It made is pretty evident that some of the spites are a little smaller or larger than their hand-drawn counterparts. For the most part, though, I think the actual sizes of the sprites as I have drawn them will work well in the game. I may shrink one or two of them. I can't say for sure until I've seen them in the game engine and how big they are compared to the tiles that make up the world around them.

Alright! It's about time I finally pinned down all the races. The last and final race came about sort of happenstance while I was thinking about other things. It was truly one of those "design just hits you" kind of moments. Long story short, after getting the details of the race down I was able to update a bunch of other aspects of the game; most notably the areas the player will explore.

With the races and key areas of the game set up it's now time to start some world and level design. I want to get a visualization of how all the different parts of the world connect to one another. Without that, I won't be able to come up with unique, fun, and challenging puzzles that prevent progression through to the separate areas in the game world.

Code-wise, there is a lot ahead of me. so far I've only basic (very rudimentary) code for a single race. That means I have, essentially, 7 more races to go. While they all will share certain portions of code, it's going to be getting that race-specific stuff down that will eat up a lot of time. It's not something I'm going to worry about immediately, but I am thinking about it while all this other stuff is going on. In addition to simply NPC mechanics, I have yet to build in the main core-game mechanic: which is converting entities in the world from one state to another. This mechanic doesn't exist at all in the code. Quite frankly, I'm not even sure how I'm going to approach it at all. Much of it is tied to specific puzzle elements of the game, so I'll at least need to take into account some design consideration.

One achievement simply leads into another task. Next up: initial pass at world building. Well, either that or creating some generic sprites for all of the game's races.

For almost a month I've been going through some excessive downtime. I think I got a little burnt out trying to force unique design ideas instead of simply waiting for them to approach me. It seemed that every time I sat down and busted out the wiki so I could start exploring some new races I would draw a blank. It was incredibly frustrating and, to be honest, it was stifling any other creative work I was trying to put forward into the game. Why couldn't I come up with two new races? That should be incredibly easy, right?

Well, all wasn't lost. At least I came up with one new race! That leaves only one behind. Due to how I want some of the game world to be laid out I already know that for this last race I'm going to have separate kinds. That is, there will be two different versions of the same race that you can interact with. Their differences will be obvious, but there won't be much other than simple looks as well as world placement that separates the two race "flavors." It should be pretty straightforward to come up with something that fits such a description, but I simply am drawing blanks coming up with anything that happens to fit in with the game world. I have a few ideas, but none of them have popped out at me. What I want are those "pop" races. The kind that when you think about the basic concept behind them it is obvious what kind of Earth creature (or being) that they should be modeled after. In any case, while it seems like I'm slacking on this front, I'm really doing backflips over this when I have a chance to just sit and "think" about the game world.

So far I have also unsuccessfully begun any spriting on the new races. I have a feeling that once I finally nail down the last race it will be a lot easier for me to move forward with generating some placeholder sprites. I went through much of the same thing when dealing with the enemy types in Ninkatsu.