Map design

We’re still working on the architectural elements of Calabeth, and something very important from a game design perspective has come up: the map layout.

Episode 1 takes place in several areas, all centered around the mystical ruined city of Calabeth, birthplace of the Conclave and now overrun by an ancient evil. The player will be able to explore the city of Calabeth, some caves below it, the graveyard and a beach. While most of this is pretty straightforward to design in terms of art, the city itself has a series of difficulties:

• Scale: How large was the city? If it is too large, we have to cut it down and block access to certain areas, since we don’t have the resources to create a large city. If it is too small, we don’t have enough space for the main storyline and the side-quests.
• Do the city architects prefer open spaces, or more narrow alleys?
• What’s the architectural style? We’re still trying to distant ourselves from the usual western medieval style used in so many RPGs.
• What are the lore-based buildings that have to be present (for the suspension of disbelief to work)
• Modularity of buildings: this is a more technical consideration, but the idea is if we can build pieces of geometry that can be reused to build a series of buildings, instead of modeling a whole city! This requires good discussions between artist and programmers, since we’re still considering making a system to build the base city layout automatically.
• Environmental art: besides the buildings, what kind of props are visible, what kind of lighting is on the scene, fog, etc

Building the city has the added challenge of some of the engine technology not being ready yet, namely the decal system. The decal system will be very important to guarantee that the world is “real”, with dirt, and weeds, and cracks in the walls, etc.

These are just some of the discussions that we have at the moment. These have to balance out the time it will takes us to do things and the look we want to achieve, which are usually conflicting with each other…

We’ll be on vacation for the next two weeks, but hopefully that will give us some time to work on the game (although with Christmas is always difficult to find the time). Anyway, we should have some blog posts for your reading during Christmas!