I admire your determination and trust that this project will flourish Sinth, truly a champion otland needs right now.
I will be there on 23rd to check out the game and provide in-depth feedback.
Thanks for the encouragement mate! I know there's a silent majority in all cases but feels good when people like yourself step up and confirm what I otherwise can only guess and hope for- that not everyone falls in to the hate-trap the trolls set up.
Players should be able to observe the area around them, and be able to deduct what they could possibly do, and what they should be doing next to advance.
When using a simpler style of mapping, it allows the player to think out the placement of every object, and their function.
However, when there are too many details, and the mapping was only done to look good, people learn to ignore it, because it has no real function and weight for the game outside of eye candy.
Very good points that i've had in the back of my head for a long time. I feel players will react a lot to the scarcity of objects(uff, bad words, eaaaarly morning). What I mean is just what you said but like.. if you see an object every other screen you don't care about it, if you stumble upon a new item after exploring 50000 tiles it has sort of a better effect
I've thought like this all along(subconciously mosly), but after reading it and seeing the idea in text makes me want to put it on yellow-notes on my screen(so that I don't use rare items unless intended/i can remember that Ive used it)
Basically what I do is
get the basic idea of what i want to do - the landscape and the templates that will be used and then ->tile->zoom out->tile->edit landscape->->tiles/borders again(nothing fancy)-> doodads. Sometimes I even skip doodas and satisfy with gravel(caves mostly ofcourse).
And then I take 1-10 "new looks" on what i just did depending on my level of interest and do some changes to it, or, I just say "Meh, whatever, ill get back here later and create something out of this mis-shaped shit". And the best part is: Most of the time its not "mis-shaped shit" but its stuff like my city/area Halmstedt, a highlander-stuff city/village that I just LOVE. BUT, it looks bad atm and im not really sure in what end to start.. but I just know the finished Halmstedt will be awesome, because I can see the potential in so many places. Anyways - sometimes its a detailed map, sometimes a place with a lot of ideas and inspiration waiting to be created and sometimes its just a passage or green field with barely even doodads.
Then that area is done(done as in created, not finished).
And then now - after mapping a half year non-stop I have 300+ "places" I can touch up to point of finish in the order i feel like, whenever the inspiration comes. I also have 300 places where I can drop off ideas or do mindless work(a nice podcast+bordering touchups for example). If I browse through some threads here I'll be like "Ohh that stuff I want to do aswell!" - now I have a place for everything so I don't need to create the place, situation or basic mapping structure from scratch - I already got the map up and its ready to be filled with art-ideas and details.
I have ofcourse also done detailing and more artistic stuff during this half-year but deliberately tried to chilll with both tile-to-tile-bordering(as they are a pain in the ass to edit) and rare-objects.(as I KNOW i'm not an experienced mapper and that once put out there's no "auto-eraser").
thanks to
@Shadowsong for stepping up and showing there's some real people out there
Not that my feeling was down the ground but. I have a big ego as said, and am not likely to submit to feeling bad over forum-discussions, but some empowerment is needed sometimes, even a "champion" bleeds
Btw, i'm gonna praise your praise by becoming MORE than what you said I am. Just not sure exactly how, but got damn it i'll do it! For OTLAnd, you and.. Zathroth(yes, it's true.. he's way cooler than Uman, sry)
