Tuesday, April 29, 2008

The Base, Part 2(ish)

I'm currently beating my head up against a wall. After spending days working on my XP system and Reputation system (and, by the way, getting only about three hours of sleep a night), I have about 4000 lines of code, none of which work the way I want. I can't nail down what the systems are even doing, much less where they are messing up. I'm tired of looking at code, but I don't want to get up until I fix the damn thing. I suppose I'll go pour myself a stiff drink and try to cool off.

As important as scripting is, that's not all there is to building a persistent world. You've also got to have areas, and building areas is Casa's strong point, not mine. Nevertheless, I thought I'd show a couple of scribbles of my own to show the direction I'm planning on taking my world. Shown are a couple of the intro areas: the jail cell the PC wakes up in, and a shot of home base.

It's not much, and it's practically devoid of placeables right now. But it does give a general idea of how the world will look. Dark, gritty, and ominous. I think proper lighting will play a large part in the design, as will strategic use of placeables to make everything look dirty and cluttered. This gets my creative juices flowing. I'm not great at building beautiful areas, but I can definitely think up how things should look based on an artistic style.

Next time I'll start outlining the layout of the land, especially home base, the city where the PCs will likely spend most of their time.

3 comments:

Casa said...

Ooooh...

Starting in a jail is a great idea! And what is that tileset in screenshot 2? Casa wants! Casa needs!

Sorry about the xp system thing, I know how it feels when you work all night and in the end nothing works...

But I'm sure you'll get it done! (and no, don't turn around, thats really not a gun pointing at your head... just a stick... just look at the screen, will ya?)

Michael A. Sinclair said...

I'm thinking of having one scene right before the jail, but I'm torn as to what it should be. I'm having second thoughts as to how my player plotline should start out, but I do know I want prison to be a part of it. Throws you right into the whole mess, which is fun.

As for the tileset, that's Ashtefere's Gothic Tileset. I think there's both a hak version and an override version on the Vault, though I'm using the hak version because it includes NWAlleys. :)

Casa said...

Casa downloads and tests.