Hiiiiiiii fokes, fat-man here again, and here's my map:
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Type: UMS - RPG
Tileset: Twilight
Size: 256x256
Players: 1
Progress: low-ish but not really important since its only february


---------------------------------------Story:

A distant, forgotten planet which faces almost complete decay; vegetation, water and other cornerstones of life have long receded, leaving behind a dusty, cracked shell of a world. All its resources, even with countless innovations, recombinations and feats of ingenuity from its natives, have long been depleted, and the only sentient race inhabiting it is rapidly headed towards extinction, hounded by atrophy, stagnation and the slow but certain failure of its factions' futile strategies to thwart pure, implacable entropy.

The sentients have split into two great factions, the templar and the artificers.
The templar are a mystical group with strong beliefs in a supposed deity, they seem to survive only through disclipining their body and spirit to the maximum in the face of ever-increasing shortage.
The artificers lay in stark contrast, fiercely pragmatic, they reject any mysticism openly and have re-defined their existence with broad, technological strokes, abandoning much of their original form and the purely organic cycle of reproduction for the hopes of achieving mechanical immortality through maintaining their 'second bodies'.

The factions, while most of their energy is devoted to merely surviving, both garner faded plans for the renewal of their dying world.


Beyond the factions, the planet is only host to the few rare faction-independents that miraculously manage to scrape by still, and the occassional pack of starved, nearly-extinct predators, though such encounters are increasingly rare.




------------------------------------------Gameplay:


You can play as a member of either faction, each faction has their own specific items (and cannot use the other's), settlement, objectives, starting point and are specifically designed to be as asymmetrical as possible for realism.
For instance the artificers have a "town portal"-like system where you can contact a shuttle and have it pick you up from anywhere on the map and safely take you back to the artificer compound, but the templar faction has no identical equivalent, it compensates in other ways.

You explore the world thoroughly; manually choose to look at things, use things, search for items and talk to NPCs, there's no walls of text showing up outside your control.
Almost every building is enterable and has randomized contents with characters to talk to and the like.

Puzzles and tasks are of two categories generally:
- utilitarian: make your life easier in some way when completed [e.g: hacking the artificer shuttle with a guiding beacon so it returns you to a selectable point on the map instead of always wheeling you back to the base]
- story-advancing: they will get you closer to the ending essentially



You only need to hotkey your main character and a Stargate.
The stargate controls everything like so:

1 (scout) - Use in world
2 (carrier)- Examine
3 (arbiter)- Talk
4 (corsair) - Use inventory item


Most of these will then activate submenus which still use the stargate to pick options, specifically:

'Examine' further divides into
1 - examine object
2 - examine surroundings
3 - examine skyline/horizon
4 - examine inventory item or yourself if no item is selected

'Use inventory item' divides into
1 - use selected health item
2 - use selected energy item
3 - use selected consumable item (grenades and things like that)
4 - use selected special/quest item (these are never used up and can be integral to puzzles)

'Talk' simply divides into dialogue options 1,2,3,4.



-----------------------Shots



Giant picture of the artificers' compound




A mediocre "blend" as it is called.




Talking to a NPC.




Inventory, pick the healing/energy/consumable type of item you want to use.
Not shown: quest items and the "junkyard" where items that aren't used or that you can't use (because they belong to the other faction for instance) are stored.





Examining surroundings.



Examining an item.

Post has been edited 3 time(s), last time on Mar 6 2009, 2:34 am by TF-.

Ooooh, twilight rpg, looking forward to this.

What's this mean precisely? Come out with a demo soon so we can all see for ourselves

I already understand what it means, it I thin it will be very cool.

But I must say that there is no way you can accomplish this in a 256x256 map with only 255 locations. Make it 192^2, I don't think any map really needs to be bigger than 192.

You could always use a location grid and move locations.

A location grid is almost useless on a map sized 256x256 - the accuracy will be waaaay too low even if you use all 255 locations.

About the map: looks cool (and well written). However, I would like to see more information about the characters you can play: what are their motivations, goals, biographies, etc.

No... You could use 128 locations for 2x2 tile incriments without using any units for the grid.

Am I going mad here? I don't think so... a 2x2 location grid would cover only half of a 256x256 map: 128 locations to fully cover one axis, 64 locations to cover half of the other axis. However, to cover the second axis fully you need another set of locations on the firs axis, only from the other side.

I'm fairly certain I'm not completely senile yet.

Am I going mad here? I don't think so... a 2x2 location grid would cover only half of a 256x256 map: 128 locations to fully cover one axis, 64 locations to cover half of the second axis. However, to cover the second axis fully you need another set of locations on the firs axis, only from the other side. So you wouldn't have enough locations, actually.

Am I? You would use 64 locations for the X axis and 64 for the Y. Then put one location on each of the corners and center on them to cover all points on the map....Your way is the most unefficient way of doing location grids. Plus it is impossible since of the amount of locations needed.Trust me I know a lot about location grids.

Btw the map looks good. I like the idea of it. Finish it!

Oh, you bring up valid points. That is actually more effective. I didn't know about that - all the work I've done on location grids was limited to a 32x32 space.

I wouldn't worry about the locations, I use a location centered on the player that checks for buildings to enter and units to talk to etc. for as many things as possible, this conserves MANY locations and I'm definitely not running out, I barely have 100 used up and I've laid down all the location-heavy stuff well in advance.


Examining things works like the submenu says pretty much, you can "look" at any of those 4 things at any time, if there's nothing to look at you'll just get a generic message; not sure when a demo will be out since the map is very random right now.


As for biographies and the like they will likely be pretty simplistic to begin with, in either case you'll be someone who has laid low all this time but suddenly decided to make a difference, and the real character development should happen during gameplay, sc unit-wise you're a zealot or a dragoon just like everybody else, you're not even a hero zealot, you have to make yourself known.

More details will come in time as the story gets more ironed out.

Oh yeah, thanks for the writing compliment, I just hope I don't run out of strings

This seems to be the most interesting project yet (at least to me). The story seems decent, the idea of the two factions having completely different benefits is great. I like how you can talk to people and interact with everything. Controlling the same unit as NPCs is nice also, it means your map will not be about plain fighting.

In spite of the fact that I'm not really fond of most extended terrain, it looks like you did quite a great job on yours (although I won't make my final judgement about that before seeing it in the game).

Finally, I completely agree with you that it is not locations but strings you need to worry about.

All in all, judging from your description and screenshots, you have done a great job so far, I'm glad to see this won't be one of those AoS-style maps but something more. Keep up the good work, I really hope you will finish this one.

I'm curious as to how fast you'll run out of Strings, or how you work around that limitation if everything is look at able / interactive.

Just like that, from nowhere, if ever you need blends, Pigy_G, Devourer and myself have made some neat (subjective) stuff in Twilight tileset.
Go see in the Terrain section (Hall of Fame and Terrain Ladder).
That's it xD
Good luck with your project

Recycle all unused/unimportant strings, Scmdraft works pretty well with that. I have around 90% strings left for dialogue and looking at things, all the systems being out of the way in that regard.


Thank you and thanks for the offer, I'll check it out sometime.

The story and gameplay sound good, but the name doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.

One question: what's the "ultimate goal" of the player characters? To save the planet?

It is, i like wierd titles; and yes ultimately they must uncover all that went wrong and fix it to make things right again.

Do you guys think I should add 'active' spells and special abilities?

Because right now it seems headed more towards simplified combat but stronger puzzles and I might make some context-sensitive 'skills' instead like being able to tamper with machinery, you'd put them to use once you have them simply by trying to "Use" objects.
The drawback ofcourse is that it might make the map feel empty to some.

I'd also have to replace the Stargate with a Starport so you'd have a 5th submenu for abilities, which sounds like too much clutter.

Can I have them?

Armoury section is sexy.