{"id":553,"date":"2016-11-04T02:46:41","date_gmt":"2016-11-04T09:46:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.crabattack.org\/blog\/hawk\/?p=553"},"modified":"2016-11-04T02:49:52","modified_gmt":"2016-11-04T09:49:52","slug":"blog-catch-up-january-2016-new-map-engine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.crabattack.org\/blog\/hawk\/blog-catch-up-january-2016-new-map-engine\/","title":{"rendered":"Blog Catch Up: January 2016 (New Map Engine)"},"content":{"rendered":"

I basically dropped the blog this year for various reasons.\u00a0That was probably a negative overall, so let’s bring it back up to speed.<\/p>\n

The primary focus for Update 9- which here in November still hasn’t been finished- was squarely on making the game more intelligible to normal human beings. The scope of this ranges\u00a0from\u00a0improving the way the game presents information, a complete redesign of the user interface, and even shaving down mechanics to be more easily understood. To this\u00a0end I started out by writing a series\u00a0of proposals for things to improve.<\/p>\n

The first\u00a0one was to finally implement the new map art style we had been planning for months prior. The game has undergone dramatic shifts in overworld movement over the years that finally required changing how we present maps<\/p>\n

\"map_style1\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The first style\u00a0allowed “free roam” over the map similar to most tactics games. It was basically just a random first guess to see how it felt. How far players\u00a0could move was\u00a0mostly\u00a0just determined by\u00a0a movement stat and terrain bonuses.<\/p>\n

\"map_style2\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The second style evolved into a more limited “node movement” where players could only\u00a0move between key locations, a response to the empty\u00a0spaces being a waste of time. The exact movement mechanics varied, but by the end players had\u00a0“stamina”\u00a0which dictated how many nodes they could move in a turn.<\/p>\n

The main problem with the second style was that it didn’t give players very strong goals, they mostly roamed around powering up and ignoring the main quest goals and battles- making for drawn out, noncompetitive games where a major system felt irrelevant.\u00a0This style eventually evolved to create the concept of “gate” nodes that required players to complete battles or other challenges before they could freely walk onto\u00a0them, solving\u00a0the detached battles problem.<\/p>\n

\"map_style3\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Making quest goals more obviously pressing was the primary objective of the third map style, which turned the map into a linear board game where players could choose\u00a0which lane to go down- making it far more obvious that the goal of the game was to reach the end of the board before other players. In general I like to think of the format as a dungeon where players try to go as deep as possible before retreating to town. Movement turned into dice rolls to create a gambling tension, and also functioned as compressing the older random events into a much faster presentation by being part of the movement (sadly at the loss of world\u00a0flavor).<\/p>\n

At this point the original isometric graphics hardly made any sense\u00a0with the new linear map style. Scrapping\u00a0the existing art was a hard choice, but when combined with a new art direction\u00a0aimed at greater productivity we knew it was the right choice. The end result to date:<\/p>\n

\"map_style4\"<\/a><\/p>\n

You might think rebuilding our entire map engine and adjusting the game to use it would have been the biggest time\u00a0investment. The reality is that it was entirely finished by the end of January. Updating the user interface would go on to consume the rest of the year, and probably beyond. Next time I’ll talk about how that process went down.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I basically dropped the blog this year for various reasons.\u00a0That was probably a negative overall, so let’s bring it back up to speed. The primary focus for Update 9- which here in November still hasn’t been finished- was squarely on making the game more intelligible to normal human beings. The scope of this ranges\u00a0from\u00a0improving the… Continue reading Blog Catch Up: January 2016 (New Map Engine)<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-553","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crabattack.org\/blog\/hawk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/553","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crabattack.org\/blog\/hawk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crabattack.org\/blog\/hawk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crabattack.org\/blog\/hawk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crabattack.org\/blog\/hawk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=553"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.crabattack.org\/blog\/hawk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/553\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":559,"href":"https:\/\/www.crabattack.org\/blog\/hawk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/553\/revisions\/559"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crabattack.org\/blog\/hawk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crabattack.org\/blog\/hawk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=553"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crabattack.org\/blog\/hawk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}