I have one month to make an MMO: Day 13
Taking a break from coding work, I spent the the day on adding some more interesting maps, and chatting to a couple of artists about art. Let me show you around
New Starting area
I’ve expanded the starting area from the initial 6 chunks in my tests to 48 chunks in area, giving new players a good amount of space to explore before being moved onto any hub areas.
The map includes space for four indoor areas: a couple of caves, a weird rock tower, and a small fort.
I think this scale of map looks good in-game, where you can only see about 6 chunks at a time. I’ve tried to give each area or “view” of the map something interesting to look at, but there are still gaps that will be filled in with features that haven’t been implemented yet.
One thing I’m acutely aware of is the amount of time it takes to put together maps like this, and should there be any significant changes in art assets, it could cause a lot of work to go to waste. In effect, putting this much effort into the map at this stage means locking myself into this art pack (by FinalBossBlues). Something to bear in mind.
Collisions
To recap, every map has a movement layer that defines what areas the player can move around in. While it might be possible to do this automatically based on terrain type, there’s just too many different terrain tiles to easily automate this. Drawing in the movement layer manually isn’t too time consuming, and gives more flexibility over how movement works.
I’ve slightly rejigged how collisions work for now. The circles prevent movement; while the triangles on each side of the tile prevent projectiles form that direction. This prevents a player from walking over water for example, but still allows the player to be shot across it by a projectile.
Note the use of this on the cliff-edge means projectiles can go from above the cliff down wards, but not the other way, giving some tactical advantage to having the higher ground.
Automatic upload
I’ve added the script I use to upload everything to the database as a “Command” in Tiled, meaning I can simply select it from the menu when I’m ready to upload the work.
Crossroads area
I’ve started drafting in the next area of the game, a crossroads that’ll link the next few areas together.
As I’m using the “Worlds” feature of Tiled, along with the chunk processing code, this area exists as a separate Tiled file.
Day 13 Task summary
Most of the day was about putting together a new map area. It gives me a nice break from coding. But I’ll need to return to finish off that dialog engine from last sprint.
I’ll get on that tomorrow, before moving onto depth sorting and other characters. The items that follow are some of the items pulled out of the ice bucket that I need to refactor, and I’ll pull in more items if time allows.
