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Wyvern Development Here you can discuss anything and everything involving creating your own content for Wyvern. Have a problem with an arch file or a map? Want to show off something you've been working on? If so this is the place for you.

 
 
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Old 05-25-2016, 02:28 PM
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Arilou Arilou is offline
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Default Ziggurat

I've mentioned previously that I was redoing the Ziggurat when the game went down and it was close to done. My intention was to put it up as part of my organizational work when the game returned, but since that will not happen, I thought I'd talk about it a bit since a lot of work went into.

Some people had guessed the direction that I intended to take it in previously. Here's one example...

Quote:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Rarkvar View Post
A nice fix idea for this would be to add the entrance at the top of the Ziggurat rather than the bottom, and have the player descend into the crypt in search for "the pirate kings" lost treasure.
Yes, that was basically the plan for the redo.
Another person once mentioned a chambered layout with hidden passages and my response was the same. So, yeah, basically, you start at the top, (in the shrine room) which is the same size as the boss room in the original Ziggurat and then descend into chambered rooms with hidden passages that allow for faster progression through the dungeon and allow access to hidden chambers. Real Ziggurats do not have inner chambers. They are completely filled in, largely with brick, and exist to house that shrine room at the top. Although no shrine room has ever survived.

Anyway, to honor both their real world purpose and the original (misinformed) design, I crafted a little backstory explaining how the lower levels are both made up of open space chambers and filled in with brick. The latter being its normal, real world state, and the former being the state that you can access via magic.

When you descend from the shrine to the first level you enter another chamber of the same size, (as the shrine) through which you can navigate to other chambers on that floor (also of the same size). On that level there are 9 total chambers. Some contain pirates for you to fight, some are puzzle rooms, and all have different access points.

So think of this as the floor layout with each number representing a room:

1 2 3
4 5 6
7 8 9

Each chamber may have as little as one pathway leading to another chamber so you can potentially start at 5 and have to through rooms 8, 9, 6, 3, 2, and 1 before you can enter room 4 even though it is next to room 5 (this not the actual design; it's just an example). Some chambers also have no doorways leading to the main chambers on the same floor and instead can only be accessed by navigating through secret passages or via a staircase from another level.

That also means that some part of navigating a given level will involve going up and down. So, for example, you might be heading east through a bunch of chambers and run into a dead end, except for a staircase. You take the staircase up one level cross into the chamber to its east, then walk down the staircase in that chamber to continue on in the level you came from (again, as an example). You also may have to drop a pushable object on floor 2 in order to activate a button on floor 3 and if you didn't do that you'll have to backtrack (the mechanic for pushable objects didn't exist so I was hoping to get Contrare to code that or, alternatively, use monsters disguised as objects that were set to be able to teleport between maps).

Each level expands the number of available chambers so there are a wider array on floor 2 than floor 1. By the time you get to the bottom level there's a whole maze of chambers with all these different paths you can possibly take. Some paths make you pick between treasure and experience, some between monster fighting and puzzles, some are false paths, leading to trapped dead ends.

Chambers on the first floor are one map each, but multiple chambers start to be grouped into a single map as you descend. So, you'll come to a point where the following (with each number representing a chamber) is one map:

1 2
3 4

You would enter from another 2x2 chambered map at chamber 1 and then have to go to, say, chamber 4 to exit to another 2x2 chambered map. This offers the opportunity to be chased around in a circle by a monster or to engage in more complicated puzzles than are possible in maps that are simply one chamber large.

Much the same pattern as the original Ziggurat exists here, only in reverse. The top two floors are mainly devoted to pirates, then you have a largely undead priest/demon underbelly. The in-story explanation that I crafted was that the pirates are trying to take over the place from the priests and their demon overlords to use as a secret base and, also, they are seeking the fabled treasure that they believe is contained within it. So you'll potentially run into a chamber with a captured priest who is being tortured by the pirates and then chambers where there are lost pirate raiders in the undead/demon section. How you interact with some of these story elements will determine aspects of your progression.

I don't want to post screenshots of actual maps any longer because I don't trust people not to try to steal them. However, here's a photo I took from a pencil outline:

Click here to view image.

It's zoomed in to the first chamber of the first floor so you don't get to see the other eight chambers of that floor. The freaky looking things are palm trees, (I wanted to maintain the original sand plus palm tree design so I crafted an in-story explanation for why they are there when it is seemingly an indoor area). T stands for trap, M between two lines means the monster takes up multiple squares, and the boxes with dots are doors (so there's an inner wall with four doors in the center of the room, which is where you enter from).

The dungeon, as a whole, was not done-done. There were puzzle elements that I wanted to ask Contrare if he could code and I didn't finish all of the chambers. However, I had enough done to provide more content than the previous version and there was a proper path to the boss. The unfinished portions are off to the side stuff, so I figured they would be things that some people would try and fail to gain access to (which is always fun to me).

Anyway, as I said, a lot of work went into it, so I thought it worth talking about briefly even though it won't make it into the game. Maybe it will help people see the potential that complex dungeon designs had, though.

If anyone has questions, feel free to ask. And let me know if anyone is interested in more such talks. If so I can discuss the plans for additional gauntlets (in the style of the Alaria one) or more Magetown graveyard expansion stuff or whatever at some point or another.

Also, yes, this is Arilou speaking, not Tom.
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