Vapourware That Which Sleeps - Vaporware Strategy RP

Goddammit, I forgot to check my mail and had no money on my card so my Kickstarter donation got fucked; much sad. Guess I'm gonna have to go paypal now, must resist urge to get beta access.

 

Ironically this is probably better for KDG, since they won't have to pay kickstarter their 10% cut.

 

Post to your heart's content, you could even archive and clone the forums for all we care - the main reason we wanted to limit the Beta Backer forum is so that we can have a meaningful discussion with a limited amount of people. I didn't think we could discuss the merits of the art approaches with 5k people all talking in a thread.

 

Rightoh. In that case I'm going to do the poor potato farmers on the codex a soid and clone the posts from the beta forum so we kan have a Kodex Kritikal Konsensus.

I'll shamelessly steal Infinitron™ any other cool devposts I come across on the backer forum and clone them here. :3

 

Personally I'm a big fan of the hexes. With a few fancy transition overlays you can do a lot to mask the underlying structure and make attractive maps. Assuming PoIs are located inside a hex as well, it'll be easier to calculate distance between PoIs using hexes. Diagonal movement on square tiles leads to all kinds of weird shenanigans.

Another option might be (and I'm sure you already discussed and discarded this) a variation of this beta forum suggestion:

Having good, tiling terrain textures with an alpha map could let you "paint" terrain the same way many 3D games (EG: Skyrim) does, where you use the opacity of textures to blend them together. I can't say if it's going to produce bettewr results when doen procedurally. As I said, my personal favourite is a hex-based approach.

While their style is more cartoony and animu than what TWS is shooting for, you might be able to glean some inspiration from the Battle for Wesnoth (http://www.wesnoth.org) forums. They've spent the last decade or so tweaking and optimizing hexagon tiles for a fantasy setting.

 

All those tile based representations look pretty great.

 

I love hexes, but I come from a hex and counter wargame background so I know not to trust my instincts.

We're staying away from any 3D texturing because of all the headaches it introduces, however similar functionality can be accomplished with 2D approaches.

We're still pending some geomorphs and cartography slices, I am holding out faith that we'll get some amazing results from these artists.

 

the samples so far seem pretty promising. Just make sure to get a generous amount of variant tiles for both terrain and transitions to make it all look more natural.

 

Ulminati anything interesting going on in the backer forums? Alas I don't have a credit card or a paypal so I couldn't back despite all my postings

 

They were pretty quiet last time I checked. A few more pix posted of UI elements and another set of map tiles. I'll check again later.

 

Those are insane.

 

A new update just got posted on KS!

 

Thanks for posting this here - the battle is still raging internally over the pros and cons of geomorphs/cartographic slices vs the more traditional hex approach, but I think we're leaning towards hexes at this point because of the functionality gains. However, I am holding out on some artists as long as I can that have said they could give us a true fantasy cartography feel with dynamic components before making any final decisions. Once we get the latest round of samples we'll be posting them all up on the forums for discussion.

 

Why not combine the two approaches, having setpiece slices for particularly interesting prescripted pieces, and filling the rest of the map in random filler hexes?

 

The problem is you then lose the functional benefits of hexes - to be more explicit we're talking about being able to destroy forests, collapse mountains to close a pass, raise/lower terrain to alter coasts, and show the encroaching corruption of badlands. We would need to be able to do this globally to be able to do it at all.

However, we are approaching both of these as a hybrid. For the Cartography Slices we are calculating hexes internally to create areas for dynamic control, so even though we lose the granularity of an all-hex approach we still have the ability to indicate dynamic changes and status. With Hexes we have some freedom to place larger sprites on top the hexes because we don't actually move our units hex-hex, instead they move between arbitrary points. So we are exploring having unique landmarks that are dropped on top of the hex terrain layer (which can be altered) which can themselves be broken down into the more granular hex components if necessary.

 

Here's the update for this week.

 

The land trembles from my furious fapping

 

fucking fantastic

 

Hexes won!


Pumped to hear that our lobbying for a random world generator means we get terrain modification as an added bonus.

 

Beautiful. Both the visuals and the gameplay elements mentioned in the update

 

That is verbatim what one of the Twins (very powerful Agent) says when he wins a battle.

 

Those graphics look excellent. Is this a mock-up piece or can you paint that in the editor now?

 

Of course it's a mock-up piece. You can't have a genuine screenshot from something which doesn't even exist.

 

This was the artist's mockup but it's based on the hexes he delivered prior (mostly adding better coastline and contours). We've commissioned the hexes to create what you see here but are still waiting delivery. We've built an external map editor for now which imports into the in-game editor, but it's looking more and more like this is the only approach viable for the game so we will very shortly make the decision to formally move ahead and add the hex map entirely to the in-game editor.

Once we get these hexes, build the map, and import the map into a scenario we can finally return to our development schedule and allow the artist to iterate over the hexes for quality and variety.