The last couple months have been assets back into the game and building out new maps. In particular, making the pixel art and progamming for the “ship” maps.
The idea with ship maps is to have them dynamic in a number of ways:
- Ships versus other ships placements for map layouts
- Ship personalization in terms of colors, size, and figurehead
- Cannon attachments that affect combat
- Ability to move the ship
After placing the pixel art into the game I realized a number of useability features had to be put in, for example above objects “behind” other objects need to have dynamic transparency when interacting in those tiles or if there is a relevant object behind those tiles. Usually the process I go by is to build the art and visual appearance first, and then end up discovering what game rules need to be programmed into to actually leverage the original design of the art assets with regards to perspective and placement.
I realized with building of the ship levels that movement on the ship involves deck elevation levels that affect the pathing, despite two adjacent tiles having no “obstacle” between them. Previously the arrow path would go through the railing, instead of wrapping around the stairs.
How different ships connect to one another is through “Plank” tiles and this turned out tricky to implement. The planks themselves have to create new paths between ships and can be placed/destroyed dynamically creating new paths. This created a number of weird scenarios with how the AI behaviour tries to move closer to enemy units and is still a work in progress.
Having Ship maps have their own design gimmicks is still fairly flawed and there’s a high potential for poor balancing when actually playing maps with alot of choke points and special damage interactions. The plan is now is to get the AI in a good place and play test a number of ship map scenarios.
To Reverie 