The other question I was pondering with respect to my Indie RPG was how to deal with maps.
I thought that implementing an Ultima7 style continuously scrolling seamless map would be cool as there are not many tile-based RPGs that do that sort of thing. I even sketched out an algorithm that was based on a tree that would grow and store neighbouring maps in memory in order to stitch them together at render time, and I’m pretty confidant it would work quite well.
However, I’m not going to do it.
And the reason for that is because I’ve been thinking about the story line and other aspects of my game and it’s now going to be delivered in a series of episodes!
Having a seamless map kind of makes sense if you are planning a huge world, but as each episode is going to be its own game having the traditional style go to the edge of the map and load a new area makes more sense.
Delivering a series of episodes means smaller development cycles and a tighter focus per game. I think I’d rather play shorter games as I mentioned in Too Many Games to Play
Now that I’m done thinking about things, I can go forth and actually start producing some real work!
#1 by Erik Hogan on March 20, 2009 - 4:16 am
Episodic sounds good. I feel the same way about long games and I’d like to see major game developers do more episodic titles, or maybe go back to the shareware model popular in the 90s.
Have you thought about sharing some locations between episodes though? I quite liked how in the Ultima, Reality-on-the-norm and Strong Bad games the locations became familiar and so I didn’t need to learn the map all over again.