Art History: World Map

Back when we were first proof-of-concepting the idea of a world map, this was really exciting:

Look at that sexy Adobe Flash Player 11 bar up there. Did you know we started this thing in Flash?

It meant that we could use images for trees and mountains to create forests and mountain ranges with foothills, with a village or two dotting the landscape. Nate could generate these, so that no two maps would be the same. You can see some semi-random tinting going on up there too, which adds variation on a bigger level and keeps the whole thing from looking too samey and busy.

It still looks pretty busy though, even given how sparse that particular map is. Let's tone down the outlines and give things a little more fill.

Feels better already. We're missing something important though—a background texture.

A papery texture for our ground seemed like a good place to start. Now we had these big lovely maps that generate mountain ranges, forests, and sites (villages, ruins, dungeons, etc). Next came concepting for the layout of the interface...

(Mystic Manguy: an Everyman for the modern day.)

Things of note here:

• A texture that sits over the parts of the map that are still unsettled and/or unexplored
• Sites being under your control or still full of monsters
• Clickable "banners" at sites that represent the various jobs and quests that are there
• Little portraits of the heroes on the map
• Gray squares over on the side that represent your hero roster
• Friendly ol' Mystic Manguy and his action bar, full of the things he can do (we specifically wanted to mirror the action bar that appears in combat)

Sounds pretty solid. Let's give it a real art pass:

(Barlox Spidermusk was an honest-to-god name that was generated by the game for one of my heroes.)

And the map looked like this for quite a while (or, you know, kinda like this. Mockups never quite look like what eventually ends up in-game). But as the art evolved for the in-mission environments and the user interface, we realized that we wanted to really push the "made out of cut paper" look and downplay the "drawn with ink on parchment" look. So some Photoshop files called "mapRevisit" started happening, and we gave the cut paper look a shot, trying to decide whether we wanted the map to look lighter or darker:

Where we ended up was a more colorful, more verdant (if you will) version that sat between the light and middle maps. Adding papery textures of course:

Exciting!

Because we're still in the process of building out the campaign, things will almost certainly be added to or taken away from the World Map. But we've got a decent, pleasant vision that we're using as a goal for the visuals. 

Milestone, and Campaign Time

We've been working hard and we hit an important milestone. We submitted Wildermyth to a couple of indie game festivals! Here's the submission video we made for the Boston Festival of Indie Games.

This video came together pretty quickly with contributions from the whole team and I'm pretty proud of it. It's not our player-facing trailer yet, but it's getting closer.

Looking ahead, we've started to think in terms of milestones. Which is itself a sort of milestone. Our next big goal is to hit what we're calling ALPHA where the game is functionally complete. (This means it can be missing content and polish and we might add more features, but it's basically a full game that represents our vision.) We think we're 16-20 weeks away from that.

The next milestone on the road is all about building the "Campaign" or "Overland" layer. There are two necessary ingredients in order for the campaign to be a game. One, it must take a significant effort by the player to make it take across the map and achieve objectives. Two, there needs to be some kind of pressure on the player to get to the end of the chapter.

So how are we going to get there? Let's break it down, with examples from other games.

One: Make it Hard to Win

Here's how some other games do this:

XCOM 2 Campaign: You need intel to contact regions and build relays. You need to fight aliens to get intel and other resources to drive research and advance the plot.
FTL Sector: In each sector there are many jumps between you and the exit. At every jump point you can be accosted and you must wait for your FTL drive to charge before you can move forward.
Mario Level: pits, enemies, puzzles.

Wildermyth: The lands start out unknown, and wild. There are hidden threats that make it more unsafe over time. You need to find and remove these threats in order to protect your holdings and make the lands safer. The plot-important sites will be hidden and far away, and you need to conquer them to advance.

Status: Some of these systems have been sketched out already, but. My goal over the next few weeks will be to make completing chapter one difficult. Once it's difficult, we can pull it back to balanced.

Two: Make it Important to go Win

How some other games do this:

XCOM 2 Campaign: Aliens make progress towards their goal (the Avatar Project), which ends the game if they complete it.
FTL Sector: after a certain point the entire map is locked down by the rebels and fights are only bad for you after that point.
Mario Level: you will run out of time and die.

Wildermyth: In each chapter, Calamities will happen over time. Each one permanently increases the difficulty of the chapter (or whole Campaign?) in some granular way. For example, by adding monsters to all missions, or by boosting the stats of particular, relevant monsters. You need Legacy Points to cancel calamities and recruit heroes, but there's a limited amount in each chapter, so you cannot out-farm the Calamities.

Status: This pressure does not exist in the game yet, so I will build it.

Three: Reward Player Activities

Um, I said there were two necessary ingredients, but then this seems pretty important also? Anyway. How some other games do this:

XCOM 2 Campaign: New gear dramatically improves soldiers. Cutscenes and dialogue celebrate your progress.
FTL Sector: Scrap, system upgrades, and new weapons/drones/systems/crew constantly make your ship more capable.
Mario Level: Powerups, coins, stars, fireworks, music, and flags!

Wildermyth: Gear upgrades, Relationships, Hook Quests, Levelups, Stat improvements, and Event outcomes.They all serve to develop hero stories and/or increase hero power.

Status: Parts of these systems are implemented, but a lot of content exists only in design form. We want there to be a slow, steady progression from farmer to gorgon-slayer, with lots of weird stories along the way.

So uh. That's what's going on this milestone. I'm excited! After this is done, we have one more milestone for ALPHA, which will be mostly about bulking up and checking boxes. Wow.

New and Exciting Event Backgrounds.

Is that last one even a background? What's going on with that weird looking mountain?

I'm learning that there are a few types of backgrounds that I'm making here. The first is a more abstract, nondescript background, like the tree trunks up there. The vast majority are this type, so that they can serve as a scene-setting backdrop for the heroes to go about their eventful business,

The second type will be slightly more specific, at the cost of being slightly less widely useful. Maybe the heroes are looking out over a mountain vista (the middle picture above), or they're assaulting a ruined tower.

And the third type will be one-offs made for specific events, like that mountain right there that maybe almost kinda looks like a wolf head. They're less "backgrounds for heroes" and more "the focus of the panel." Not every event will have these, because it would limit the number of events way more than we want to, but if the moment is special and I'm feeling the art bug bite, we can go nuts.

Romance Me Until I Level Up

Love is a box of earth in which you've buried your hopes as seeds. Sharing this box with someone, you become fragile to that person's touch and temper. In her or his hands is your garden. It can be up-dug, it can be drowned, or frozen dead.

When this person then plants her or his own dreams inside, you must be surprised. You must be floored, when she or he places this box between you. And drawn to the heat of it, you crouch over the soil, you nourish it, sing to it, dampen it, wait for it.

What sprouts, what flourishes, thrives or dies, time and the tantrums of weather decide. But setting yourself beside this person to grow dreams together, someday you realize it was this act, this humble task you shared, that fulfilled you most. Not the dreams, the seeds, the gleams of a brilliant goldlit future. Even if they lifted petals to the sky, and drooped afterwards with fruit. Even if they never broke the surface of the earth at all.

It was the little moments you were patient with each other and with life and the dreams you slept for that brought you to wholeness.

I mean, maybe. I don't know. Or you broke up or grew apart because things got weird somewhere, and anyway there was this other box I had, this one I didn't share with you, and the dream in there was the one I couldn't let you touch, I'm sorry, it was. Different.

Sorry, I know, but, and it's just.

Anyway, we're considering doing away with experience points entirely. We think this could be a good route to go.

When and if we do, level-ups will live where relationships do, tied to hooks. Characters who complete their personal stories will become more powerful. Hey! It's just like real life! If this system does get adopted and designed, I'll share more about it later. Mostly, this might just be a loving Wednesday post.

But...

Mm. I love it when you talk about game-mechanical advancement, darling. Speak to me.

...no. Nothing. I'll tell you later. <3

A Skeleton By Any Other Name...

...would still skeleton. It would skeleton everywhere.

Because it's bones.

But seriously folks, today I'm talking names. This isn't only because we're in the midst of implementing stuff that's already been posted about, and don't have much else on the brain.

I don't... I can't actually think of any other reason.

Okay, but so recently we've had some talks about naming our monstergroups. Particularly, there were two that wanted some attention. The first was our group called "Cultists." These are basically people who worship bull/minotaur gods, and thrive in deep places, caverns etc. We wanted a name that reflected their aesthetic, as believers in a certain thing, and then an inkling of what that thing might be. The name we arrived at was Deepists, fanatics whose Deepism is so deepdown they doop and derp without doing any undeeply.

Deep double-deep-dop-doop.

That was a fairly easy name to decide on. It adds the necessary distance between judging their religion and describing it. It maintains some mystery while also being fairly on-the-nose. It can seem to thrill you, until it starts to feel awful and empty.

Um, and that's intentional, but.

And so then we get to our skeletons.

An early-on decision with our direction for foes was: let's not fall back on old tropey mobs, the expected and over-hashed regulars like green-skin-goblin, over-toothed-orc and friends, skeleton-soldier.

But I still like a skeleton. I mean, who doesn't?

The Morthagi, as we then called them, turned into something different. They've got the important necromantic heartbeat, the undeadness. Annie and Nate came up with this idea to make them part-clockwork, a marriage of magic and machinery to reanimate old bones.  

That's right, cocktail-shaker, I called you old.

This is a great start. Feels unique enough, strange enough, mystical enough. It leaves us with so many directions our lore could go...!

These directions, in our most recent discussion, came out while picking a permanent name that would carry these guys into alpha. Here's a primer:

Morthien - Implies an artistic, elegant creator, designing her Morthiens from a studio in her rain-draped mansion by moonlight, sipping wine and fiddling with the mechanizations and incantations that would compose this purposeful servant.

The Morth - A pervasive and bubbling threat, a hidden horde that might rise from beneath us at any moment. A thing we could begin to live beside, until we someday call it master. Sentience and racial identity, a species itself, even if it began as someone's science experiment.

Morthagi - A clattering word for a clattering crew. Morthagi reflects a league of grass-roots necromancers, secret bone-and-brass enthusiasts, who assemble these janky magicalia/machines, and celebrate each others' designs.

We ended up re-confirming our decision to go with Morthagi, for how they fit our world. The Wildermyth describes a wild universe, a collaboration of many strange and equal parts. Gray parts, I would say, rather than black ones or white ones. Morthagi feels right in that context. Their makers live in such a universe the same as anyone: full of wonder, curiosity, hope, joy, doom.

Why this all is notable, I suppose, is to illustrate how simple things like names can affect the lore and idea-group surrounding a game-component like a monster, a place, a character, even an ability, so substantially, that how the game is perceived is always affected. In almost any creative activity. Content points to title, title points to content. Being aware of that, and intending the result, is always a good idea.

And so I guess I'm saying...

A skeleton by any other name is sometimes a Morthagi. And that's just way different, okay?

...

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Nope nope nope don't care don't care.