Friday, March 31, 2017

Ideas for next map types

I'm playing with some ideas for which tileset/map type I want to add next.  Here are some, in no particular order, with notes.  Ideas/suggestions are welcome.

Matango
There isn't much to this one, but it looks sort of cool, what with the transparent tree overlay and all.  The indoor areas would be the hut tileset like islands/the original matango interiors.



Sewers
These aren't the prettiest maps, and they were pretty annoying to navigate in the original (mostly due to characters getting stuck), but they could make for an interesting maze or something.

Witch's Forest
Definitely one of the better looking tilesets in the game.  Shouldn't be too much effort to generate - everything is on layer 1 since layer 2 is full of clouds.

Upper Land
The SoM Editor doesn't really view these correctly for some reason.  Might be annoying to generate with the large trees and making them flow smoothly together.



Sunken Continent
The gray hallways and stuff from under the purple continent. I guess that "subway" map could be the interiors with the NPCs.


Cliffs
The area around Shade's palace with the slow-scrolling layer 2 background.  Looks pretty neat I think.



Desert
Seems like something that should exist just based on it being a notable place with a lot of unique enemies, but I think I'd have to do a lot of tileset fuckery to make this work with the way I currently generate maps.  The desert itself and Kakkara are separate tilesets, and without the little Kakkara houses I have no idea how I'd make actually "indoor" areas work.




Ice Palace
I like the exterior of this place a lot, but the interior is really just my ruins interior with a blue palette.  There might be a way to make it unique enough from the Ruins stuff to use.  I would really like an excuse to use its song.


Ice Country
It's a nice looking tileset with the rainbow trees and all, but there aren't really any interior structures available on the tileset except caves.  There might be a way I could combine the Santa's Workshop/Toto houses into it and have that work somehow.




Desert Ship Thingy
I sort of like this as an indoor/outdoor maze of sorts like the Ruins are now.


Town
This could maybe be made to work, with a mazelike structure to the exterior.

Mana Palace
This one is sort of a staple of SoM.  Would probably be nice to see it worked in somehow.

Witch's Castle
Not sure exactly how I'd make this one work, but I do like how it looks.

Purelands
Like Upperland, this would probably be kind of a dick to generate procedurally and still have everything fit together and look good.


Manafort Exterior
There isn't really much to this, but it could probably be made to work somehow.


Undersea Thingy
The first part of the sunken continent that looks like it's supposed to be under the sea or something.  Pretty nice looking tileset.

Luna Palace
And then I guess there's this.



2 comments:

  1. The first thing that striked me was the thought "Yeah, a town with mobs in it is new and unique. This could be really cool". But really, all those tilesets except maybe for Luna Palace (an all black tileset wouldn't be very interesting), Upper Lands (Forest tileset already fills that tileset type pretty good with all it's different colors), Manafortress exterior (Indoor is way more interesting and already working pretty good) and Witch's castle (Maybe I just can't really imagine how it would look, but it's not that interesting for me. I prefer the related witch's forest over it) could be fantastic. Maybe you could switch the forest music with the upper-lands music to also bring in more unique music? That's just a suggestion. My personal top three from these tilesets would be 1. Town 2. Purelands 3. Ice country.

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  2. it'd be neat if you regulated how often would a type of level show up, to increase variety and make some areas stand out more (like Pure Land once on the last few floors or something)

    this way you could also consider having a no-indoors map like the desert, limiting how often they appear

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