Gad Games Update: World Map Sneak Preview

[Gads]

He does excellent work. You say that the map is discovered in-game. How does that work?

Basically, once in 'game mode' there will be three levels of 'map scale'. When you join the game you will be assigned to one of the 5 regions or rather continents. During the playtest only one of the regions will be open for play, so in this case the player won't have a choice.

So once you are in 'game mode', the system is not concerned about the other regions. It treats each region almost as if it is a separate game. Movement between them will and can happen, but it will be infrequent and rare.

So, back to the 3 levels of 'map scale'.

Thumbnail Region Map: This will be low res (600x400) map of the region (continent). It will be slightly smaller than the low res world map I uploaded to our blog. It won't give much detail besides the general outline of the land mass and the major terrain areas.

Detailed Region Map: This will be somewhere between A4 and A3 in size. It will be high detail (similar to that of the snippet I uploaded to our blog) where all the terrain areas will be clearly visible, settlements along with names, roads, rivers, etc. This will be displayed in a fixed viewport (about 600x400) where the player will be able to move the map around within the viewport.

Tiled Location Map: This will be generated by the map engine and tiled. It's scale will be around 4x of the detailed region map. For the player it will be displayed also within a viewport which will only show a 5 x 5 grid.

All three maps are interlinked and related. The player can click anywhere on the thumbnail region map and it will automatically centre that portion of the map in the viewport of both the detailed and tiled maps. The location on the thumbnail map will be depicted by a cross-hair and on the detailed map by a square outline. The square outline will be the area that will be shown in the viewport of the location map.

So the player can basically navigate on each of the three different map scales and all three maps will automatically adjust themselves to correctly display.

The discovery part comes into play really only on the location map level. The tilesets will only be revealed to the player as his character encounters and explores that area of the map.

The other two maps (the illustrated maps) will obviously help the player alot, but as the location map is at a much more detailed scale, there will be much to learn and explore.

For example, there will be vast areas of plainlands or forests, etc. At the location level this could mean the character will see nothing but the same terrain type for many many tiles in all directions. Our approach is going to be a little different. At this scale, if you were set in a huge forest, we're going to break it up somewhat to make it more interesting. A huge forest may be made up of clumps and clusters of openings (plains), or the odd lonely mountain, some hills, etc.

I'm not claiming this to be anything new, but it enables us to produce some beautiful map illustrations that not only are pleasing to the eye but also acts as a high level aid to playing the game, planning long term journeys, identifying roughly where friends may be positioned in relationship to you, historical articles have visual references, etc. They give all this richness to the game without totally taking away all the surprise and excitement of exploration and discovery.