Thread: Ziggurat
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Old 07-13-2016, 04:18 PM
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I didn't necessarily draw anything ahead of time in the early days. Forgotten Oak was originally created by opening up a big map and randomly dragging earth terrain around. Then I started wondering why that would be there and concluded that it would be there in a ruins area. Cue opening up the structures folder and dropping ruined buildings around as the idea was forming in my head. Amita's original box map was similarly conceived and my early indoor maps were largely the product of opening a 25x25 map and filling them in. The results were not good.

I think the first thing I started mapping out by hand was the Forgotten Oak Skull Cave since it was a complex, multi-map dungeon with different paths that intersect. That was made after the release of Forgotten Oak and before Amita came out, two months later. The drawings for that were very basic outlines that I scribbled on a blank sheet of printing paper. Think simple shapes, about a couple inches in size, with dashes where I wanted the teleporters to be.

A lot of what I map out by hand takes that form; rough scribbles for the purpose of getting down where each hallway/rooms is and how they intersect. I didn't often get into where each item/monster should be at that stage or decide on the exact size of the map at that point.

In any case, I didn't start consistently doing that immediately after the Skull Cave, but I soon realized the importance of it, particularly as I moved away from one map areas and stated working on things like the Forgotten Oak Castle redo with the different hallways and rooms that link together and various complex dungeons.

The use of graphing paper to get everything down first was not common for me, but it was doable/necessary in the case of the Ziggurat since it combines a basic map design with a complex overall dungeon design. If I was creating a twisty cave map, for example, mapping out each square on graphing papers is more work than just doing it and isn't helpful enough to be worth the time sink it creates. What I would do, in that case, is draw the shape of the map first and mark teleporters/note the main enemies that should be in the map, but that's it. It's often important to do that regardless when working on games, in a general sense, because it helps when explaining to artists what they need to draw for you and, of course, it's critical if you don't have a map editor and have to write out the placement of everything in code, as Rhialto did for Wyvern's early maps. However, since we had a map editor the latter no longer applies and Wyvern map design was very individualistic so whatever you choose to draw is for your benefit only and not because you need team members to see what you want done ahead of time.

Getting back to the Ziggurat; since it's just equally sized box maps linked together it's not that difficult to do such detailed square by square work ahead of time and because of the complexity of the overall design it was critical for me to be able to see it all together ahead of time. When some rooms have four potential paths to connect to other maps and I only wanted to make two of those, on average, available to players it helps to know why those are the two available paths.

If I just drew a bunch of boxes on printing paper and inserted dashes to indicate teleporters, that teleporter placement wouldn't be well thought out. I needed to know that this was going to be a trap room, this was going to be an empty map, this was going to be a false path, this was going to be a pirate bar, etc., and I needed specific details about those maps before I could decide how to link them together. It's particularly involved when you also factor in jumping up and down between floors as a normal part of the player's progression and hidden corridors that secretly link to certain maps in different ways.

There are also instances where chamber space cuts into hidden corridor space by deviating from that box shape a bit and when that happens it's important to make sure there's still a viable path for players to navigate. For example, if I have one chamber below another chamber and I add an extra two lines of map space to the top of the bottom one, I then can't do the same to the bottom of the top map without blocking the hidden corridor pathway for players since it's real space. Meaning, if I took everything and put it together in one big map, it would all fit together perfectly. And, again, accomplishing that means mapping it out ahead of time because I didn't know that I wanted to add space to a map and where I wanted to add it to until I figured out what kind of map I wanted it to be. Hence the importance of hand drawing everything in this kind of detail.

But I didn't forgo simpler sketches altogether. I did do that as a rough draft. The more detailed graph paper drawings are the second draft.
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