Dragon Warrior

(world map)

so i was thinking about how the world map was going to work. i was thinking along the lines of zelda:la and final fantasy adventure, where there's a 16x16 array of single screen maps. if you hit the edge of the screen, you're transferred to the next map. it worked, and thats fine by me.

(towns)

i have to come up with how i'm going to represent the towns in the game. what i want is to have it done like in zelda:la; an area of the world-screens is set aside for the town. the buildings are roughly scaled to your size and you walk into a door tile and warp to another map, the inside of the building.

final fantasy adventure blocked access to all but the south edge of a town world-screen, and walking onto that screen warped you to a series of maps that wouldn't fit on the overworld map altogether. i don't like the restricting feel that would impose on me. it wouldn't feel right if i were to have a hut lying just far enough away from a town to not fit in its borders - because i'd have to walk all around the border to get to it, when i should have been able to just walk straight to it from the corner of town.

in dwi+ii-1, the towns are roughly 3x3 screens in size. if i kept to that, the eight towns in the game would take up: 8 x 3x3 = 8 x 9 = 72 screens. if there are 16x16 = 256 screens to make up the world, that works out to be 28% of the world. one quarter of the world-screens will be town maps. it sounds a bit.. wrong, at first. but, realize that if you're not in town, you're in the wilderness fighting monsters - and that's still three quarters of the world to do that in.

if i were to go with that, i'd have to do some serious terraforming to fit some of the towns on there. extending this thought, the world is suddenly going to feel alot smaller, because you'll be getting around it faster, and the trees and hills are going to be shown at a completely different scale.

here's a picture of what garinham looks like in dwi+ii, from the world map:



now, we have to take that area and expand it to three screens! see what i mean? we need to shove those mountains back a bunch and arrange things .. differently. i took some time and chunked some screencaps together:



and thats not even the whole map! its almost like they just didn't care about the geography around this town, they just threw it together. all i can think of is to just fit the big building in along two screens and arrange the buildings around it. whats up with all the water? where's the forest to the southeast? what about the shoreline? i might be doing some altering of the town here too, so there's a little more sense about the geography.

since i'm keeping zelda:la and ffa in mind here, buildings can be as small as 3x2 tiles in order to get just enough information in to suggest house-ness. obvserve:



i was thinking that garin's grave could be hidden 3 maps deep - enter long building map, use key and get into the building map, and find the hidden entrance to get to a back-way map that you can't access by just walking around the building.. its possible we could just fence it off along the top, but if you run fences all along the top of the building, and not let them see the path, it could work out nicely. hmm, but that might give away the secret too. hmm, hmm.

i want to drop the cut-away roofing that dragon warrior seemed to be proud of, in lieu of a more space-conserving method like 3x2 housing. i guess i'll have to do some playing around before i can know for sure.

one last thing i want to drop in here is that i need to look at how the world maps will break up into 16x16 single screens. i'm sure i'm going to have to do more terraforming to make the screen breaks look more 'pretty'. i wonder if things will even look the same at all anymore after i push around forests and rivers. i'll need a big map file with a division overlay. work work work ^_^