HEY HEY JAY RAY #1: World Maps

[JayRay]

Hey Hey Jay Ray!
World Maps
by John Timmons (1/23/15)

How do you like to move around your maps? If you remember as a kid, playing those old-school RPGs there was the Zelda/Willow way, which basically had all the maps interconnected, and if you wanted to get from town to castle, you actually had to go from map to map to map. Then, games like Final Fantasy, Dragon Warrior and others came along, where the continent, island, even the entire world was able to be traveled on, as long as one was ready for the intermittent ambush.

Once 3d games started coming out, more and more reference to the WORLD map showed up, from the world maps of Final Fantasy to the expansive terrain of games like WoW and Elder Scrolls games. Your world became your living map, where you had just as much of a chance for a quest and exploration in the outside world, as you did in the dark dungeon or abandoned castle.

In my project, 'Heroes of Roguehaven', while I still would like to have those map to map traverse, I also like the idea of long distance world travel, with the chances of running into so random monster along the way, or even finding secret dungeons or castles off the beaten path!

What I've proposed is to treat each country or region like a large map, with dozens of locations as events buried in each map. Passability would be limited to land and areas, and depending on an editor-capable 'terrain tag' I think a world map could relate for up to 8 different terrain types. Some might change player speed while on them (Forests, rocky areas) while others might slowly damage players, and others even heal them. Still others might inflict certain states on players, and even others might increase the chances for random encounters, or random treasure! Events in each area are triggered based on either a location switch being turned on, or, if they're just the random side-quest, these events might pop up if a player comes within 1 or 2 tiles from that location.


Once a player moves from region to region, new locations would become available, basically treating each 'Region Map' just like a regular map, but on a much larger scale.

I had originally thought to have the entire world just be freely available, but then realized it might not be good for our adventurous knight at level 5 to stumble on that level 80 castle, and dive right in... (Albeit a very humerous death that is much like some of my own deaths in table-top RPGs.)

Then I thought if I should use actual autotiles and tilesets for the world map, or if I should use a pre-configured map like the World Atlases by Cosmic Kitty and Olivia. While I like the idea of mapping a large and expansive map, the parallaxing mapping possibilities appear to be more tailored to my needs so I will probably go that route.

So, what do you all think? How will YOUR world shape up? As always, feedback definitely welcomed

(Next Week - Who needs Sleep? The perils of INNS)