Frayed Knights: The Dungeon Takes Form
Wow.

A couple of weeks ago a friend of mine, Kevin, offered - due to a lapse in sanity as much as a feeling of pity for me, I'm sure - to build interior levels for Frayed Knights. I sent him a copy of the design document (See! They do come in handy!), and then promised to send him a 2D map for him to convert into the Temple of Pokmor-Xang.

I hadn't actually sketched out the complete map yet. I'd written up descriptions and notes on all major locations in the temple, and had something of a mental image of how the layout should work. But every time I'd tried to sketch the thing out, I'd get stymied. It didn't feel right or good enough. Having someone waiting for me pushed me to plow forward. I think my underlying problem was that I was just suffering a mental block due to lack of self-confidence or something. As it is where you start the game, I purposefully kept it on the simpler side, with a more linear path through the dungeon (plus plenty of optional rooms to visit).

But once the the pressure was on, I got it done. I can't say it was a masterpiece - my little graph-paper map looked a lot like the Dungeons & Dragons adventure maps I used to draw up in the seventh grade. I'm not sure my skills have changed at all since then. The rooms were even numbered to correspond with the location descriptions in the design document. High cheese factor. But it followed my mental image well enough, and I gave instructions to Kevin to feel free to embellish as he saw fit.

We ended up getting into some discussion as to who the cultists are that are currently residing in this temple. I explained that very few were human, and they were pretty much "redneck cultists." Poor personal hygene (they worship the god of boils, blisters, and pimples, after all). Beds propped up on cinder blocks and whatnot. Primer-colored paint on the walls or something. They'd keep the main thoroughfare clean and tidy out of respect for and fear of Pokmor-Xang. But the temple itself predated any of the current cultists - it was made back when Pokmor-Xang was... if not popular, at least a little more accepted in society. So at one point it might have been a little more evil and costly-looking.

Kevin took the crappy map and lame descriptions and added a healthy dose of awesome, with some great creative embellishments. He sent me the first draft of the dungeon, which I tried last night. Can I tell you how cool it is to (virtually) walk through something that was only a graph-paper sketch and some text descriptions the day before? I stood in the meditation chamber (sans toilet-looking fountain, currently) and looked around and maid a Neo-esque "Woah!" noise.

Now it's still early (too early for me to post screenshots, sorry) - this was just to test the layout, and there's not even a roof over much of the place (though he's done some great work with pillars and archways). The hardest part will be settling on the textures. I'm really trying to back off of the photorealistic effect and err on the side of cartoony. I'm spending some time trying to dig up reference images, but it's hard to zero in on the right "look."

Other Developments
I also spent some time revising the ol' design document and resubmitting it for the Dream Game contest. I'd like to stay in the running on that one.

As I mentioned earlier this week, I got the trap system working, and I think it's actually going to play out okay. I'm now focusing on making it all data-driven and stuff. My approach to doing this is to create a file first, and then write the function to read and parse the file, and use it to construct the object. It's all working now, except I discovered that I'd neglected to include linkage between components in the file format. Woops! That's an easy fix.

Besides that, there's trap discovery and more feedback to the player on what's going on. Simply having the trap screen disappear and one or more characters take damage isn't quite enough, for some reason. Go figger.

My goal is to have all the principle systems in place by November 1. November is going to be spent integrating them all together and making the game resemble a game. And fixing bugs. And trying to do all the little odds-and-ends stuff that I neglected up until that point.


(Vaguely) related babblings:
* RPG Design: Big World, Small Dungeon - Does Size Matter In RPGs?
* Frayed Knights: Disarmament Treatise
* Frayed Knights: First Five Minutes Walkthrough
* Frayed Knights: Orange
* RPG Design: Quest Abuse
* Frayed Knights: Trap Disarmed!
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Labels: Frayed Knights

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