Blog Catch Up: August-September 2016

August 2016

This month was largely spent on wrapping up map terrain generation for the new tile style. In retrospect it seems like I mostly spent it burned out, though.

September 2016

At this point me and Sew had got together and started trying to solve a lot of the issues with information presentation in the new map style for the past several months (by which I mean I told Sew how the map worked and he had to sort out my mess). At this point I was finally starting to implement much of it. The main thing was just to start introducing a consistent visual language to the map:

The spaces themselves would be used to indicate what happens when players end their movement on them. The bulk of spaces would be simple blue/red colors to give the map a cleaner look, while the rarer special spaces would have imagery to indicate what they do.

Objects that “intercept/interrupt” movement would appear between spaces. Objects that trigger when passing by would appear above spaces.

We used bubbles to give detailed information about a specific object. The “!” signs indicated something that would happen to you, while the fist signs were attacks you could do to other players.

I’m actually still pretty happy with most of the work we did for this map style. If we ever revisit the board game format in a different game we can probably reuse a lot of the work we did here. That’s how I convince myself to sleep at night, anyway.