Well... I've finally started to consider moving on from my terrain engine onto actual games programming, but only due to the fact that I've decided to throw out my streaming code due to it causing lag of a sort. This isn't all bad though, as it means I can get to work on more important things all the sooner, but it has limited me to 256x256 heightmaps. Anyways, enough of the games programming talk, I'm here to talk design. Given that my maps are going to be pretty small, I'd like to attempt to give the game more atmosphere. When I got down to thinking about it, I think it'd feel awfully claustrophobic and limiting with such a small map, but then I guess you could really go to town embellishing every last detail, making every single square meter of the map contain something interesting and worth investigating, rather than having vast expanses of land existing for no purpose other than to be looked at. So, what could we as designers do with such a small area? I imagine you could make heavier use of puzzles, as the player will know that the answer is somewhere within the confines of the small map. I'm a little worried about not having enough space to make a level feel long enough, just how many challenges could you pack in a small level? This may appeal to casual gamers though, as small levels could be the quick fix needed to attract people without 40 hours a week to spare. Horror could be used to an extent I should think, especially using scenarios where the player is trapped (can't move around too far if you're trapped). Defensive scenarios could be used again, as this limits player movement. I suppose anything that limits player movement would work, but I wouldn't want the player to feel trapped for the entire game. Does anyone else have any thoughts on this issue, suggestions for scenarios, how to keep a player amused in a small area or anything else to expand on what I've brought up? Cheers, Steve

I really like small maps - mostly because large maps feel empty most of the time. ;)

I guess you're talking about roleplaying games, right? Just how small ist the map? Can one house fit into it? One room? A small town?

What I would do is pack the map with content. Instead of the typical one-puzzle/fight-per-room design the map to hold a couple of them. Alos, there might be hints for other puzzles/quests in the room, a solution to another and a secret holding space, or something like that. Just fill the smaller maps with more content than usual.

It's usually not the size of the map that bothers me, but the amount of thing that happen. If you can teach the player, that it is worthwhile to explore the levels more thoroughly (because there is much content) then they won't mind if the map itself is smaller. What exactly captures the players' attention depends on the game itself...

Thanks for the reply!

When I say a small map, I'm not 100% sure of the size yet, as it depends on several things. The perceived scale of the map changes depending on speed of the player and tiling frequency of the textures. I'm toying around with it at present, but currently I'm thinking that a map will take roughly a minute or two to reach either side. So it's big enough to perhaps represent a portion of a town or a small-medium dungeon. I'm thinking that gameplay will be based around events rather than focusing on a huge storyline. Again, this allows me to focus effort into creating rich, but short stories. Oh, sorry, and that's correct, it is going to be RPGish in nature.

One thing I worry about is level edges, I think I may use some cartoony style glowing barrier at level edges, which when reached will give you the option to leave the level and move to another map/quit the game etc. one advantage of having worked on streaming though, is that currently, my heightmap can be loaded, fully textured in around 100th of a second. I think I'm going to be able to keep loading times extremely quick, so moving between maps will be very quick with no fuss, so a larger storyline could be fought over several maps.

Of course, I'm linking this in with my idea of player GM's, and considering a future/fantasy hybrid setting, so I think it's shaping up to be something quite different to most things out there at the moment.

Cheers,

Steve

The biggest problem I see with small maps is that I'd be difficult to move npcs across the map-borders. If you use several maps for a dungeon for instance, players can cheat by fleeing across the border. If both maps are on the screen and npcs can cross the line as well as the player then that problem is solved.

Since you can load the levels so fast, is ther a problem with having more than one on the screen at once? You could perhaps store a "sub-world" transformation matrix so that the center of the map the player is on is at (0,0,0) and the center of the map to the right is at for example (256,0,0). Everything on that map gets transformed by the matrix.

You could either store all the neighboring maps in memory at once or load them when you need to. In that case the worst case scenario is 4 maps at once when you're in one of the corners of the current map.

Without wanting to go too deep into the game programming side of things, technically I probably could have several maps loaded at once, but that's what lead to my decision in the first place. Though maps load quickly, it's difficult to spread the cost of loading over time. I'm not 100% sure why, but it seems that once you lock buffers and start uploading data, it slows everything else down regardless of whether its in a slow running worker thread or not. It is quite memory intensive as well, so loading 4 maps at once would not allow me much freedom for lots of models/etc. Also 4 maps would not blend correctly at the edges, so there would be visible seams between maps.

All in all, I just decided it's a lot less hassle, and more likely that I'll complete my game if I dont bother with huge maps. It's not that I can't do it, but that there are more important things to worry about, that will take less time to implement, as aside from a terrain editor, my engine consists of little else, and I'd like to start thinking about special effects, player/NPC controling classes, scenery, things like that. Thanks for the suggestion though all the same :)

There are lots of possiblites of what you can do with a small space. You can included a more detailed enviroment by having more entities and objects. It allows you to add more proccessor intensive actions such as deformable terrain. You could devise intericate puzzles for the player to solve, its all up to you.

I wouldn't worry about loading and displaying multiple maps at once since you'll loose the advantages of what it sounds like your engine provides. However you may want to consider cashing adjacent maps depending on how long it takes to load a map.

As to the problem of escaping npcs by moving to an adjacent map that, can easily be solved by making npcs map independant. Instead their position could be tracked on an area coordinate system, where an area is made up of a series of maps. Then you only need to display npcs that are on the current map and yet they can move to any map in a given area.

One last reply, rushing off out as always in a sec. Just regarding the deformable terrain bit. I've actually found that may be feasible, as I've just finished adding in-editor heightmap editing. It's done very similarly to Morrowind with a circle cursor(adjustable radius and falloff) to adjust height of vertices in realtime. I've found that it doesn't affect the frames per second half as badly as I thought it would.

So yeah, deformable terrain is worth consideration. Also, the whole NPC crossing map boundaries is something along the lines of what I'm planning, though as I'm planning on having player GM's in the game, the GM could always spawn a new monster on the new map if he/she wished to pursue a player ;)

Anyways, gotta dash, thanks for the feedback :)

Steve

I always found games that go vertical pretty interesting. Even though your map may not cover a large area, you could still make it fairly large and detailed if you build things up into the sky. Not many games rely heavily on vertical movement, which is knd of a shame since the danger of heights make gameplay challenges more risky and captivating (remember the sky levels in any megaman or mario game)?

Just some random thoughts, but I think that if your feeling really claustrophobic in your game levels, then this could help compensate for the lack of horizontal space to explore.

The size of your levels sounds a bit like the one in Neverwinter Nights. The NWN engine is very modular but maps themselves are not that big, so it might be interesting for you to see how they designed their levels. :)