So this update is rapidly degenerating into atoning for sins of the past. Long story short while working on new classes that use status effects, I decided to make one a passive on the map. I then very quickly realized I had never actually gotten around to making map passives work. And then while I was in the guts of the code I realized that most of the ability targeting code was in desperate need of an update. For instance, it hadn’t been updated to use nodes instead of tiles yet. While I was in there I added bunch of other missing features, cleaned it up, etc. It’s about done now, mostly just getting the kinks out and fixing up the interface. So! Hopefully we’ll get to test update 3 this week.
Meanwhile Sew proposed the idea of moving to having one bigger map instead of our current model of having effectively 3 small maps connected together. It has some advantages towards solving our “maps are boring” problem: It allows the layout to be more important since it stays around all game (instead of being disposable like they are now), it allows a greater sense of world, it potentially allows a greater amount of long-term emergent strategies, and it allows re-usable subnodes to be more critical to the flavor of the map.
On the downside it completely tears a hole through battle balance and pacing. How do you make a higher level player be forced to trudge through a low level area anything other than busy work that wastes critical time? A persistent problem has been with a time scale so short it’s hard to make it readable as to what difficulty level a player belongs in at any given time (in a traditional rpg it’s not a major time waste to fight a battle in an area and see how you do. not so much in this game). Right now we’ve duct taped the problem by just not letting people in an area until they’re roughly around it, but opening the map rips that apart. There’s some ideas on the table to make this stuff work. Stuff like having the map get more dangerous as the main quest is progressed. But it requires some drastic changes and doesn’t necessarily solve everything.
Right now it feels a little like a conflict of interest by being programmer and designer: I don’t want to do it because it will add a lot of programming work, and we don’t have that much time left to waste on it. So for now I’m plowing through with my planned changes and seeing if they can improve the game enough. If not, it may be time to see if we can make the open map work. It won’t be a waste of time because all of the changes will be just as relevant (if not more) in an open map anyway. In the meantime I’ll be thinking about how I can make the open map thing work if it comes down to it.