Well its been about 3 weeks since I last gave an update on this thing.
(people seem to think I'm making one tileset, but its so bigger than that
)
This is coming along, I had a mayjor breakthough with stairs that I needed in order to have a natural flow between forest and town, forest and mountains and so on, I needed multible up and down stairs from the forest where the party would end up at different locations. Komag, Xanathar and Grimwold pointed me in the right direction, and after countless timetriggers and pressure plate failed tries, I found what seems to be working 100% all the time, the trick is to have the stairs descend into nothing where you have placed a silent teleporter in the "void" that points to the right destination, that gives you the walking animation and the party will end up at the correct destination all the time and you never need to worry about the party running into that teleported from the other side (no spawning and despawning scripts)
So the original design plan is a go.
16 levels of adventuring madness
The forest tileset is finished, the town is finished,
I'm working on the sewers (hence the water exercises earlier this month)
The swamp is a variant of the forest so that will not be too much work.
I was thinking about using Daniv's Norther Dungeon for the mountain part but I will create the Summit.
and I haven't started on the underground (I've made the up and down stairs) and cultist lair and Ruins.
The story is all done, and I have 3 guys running some tests for me (3 of the 10 people that tested Tomb of Zarthos)
(even though the tilesets are not done, they are running the design with the temple tileset)
The test involve playing some of the puzzles, are they too hard, are they fun etc etc.
One of the things that came up during testing was the distance, in the original LoG you are going down for the most part, but here you are running back and forth through the zones (the story makes you get something at place A so you can open up place B and so on)
This was less the fun, so we looked into teleporters. The first solution was to have teleporters take you back when you had finished a particular dungeon crawling line (or quest line, but we don't have quests
)
But I found that a bit .. to easy
So I started looking into some kind of "fast-travel" system, a spell that is cast on a specific tile that will open up a portal to a given place.
That made me create stone arches and place them around the zones, so for example the town has an Item (Scroll of Townportal << that's original
) so If that scroll is used on a tile in front of the stone arch you will active the portal to the town.
This could even be made a spell for a wizard, and we can have multiple spells for different destinations, townportal, forestportal, summitportal etc etc.
I also thought, if the destination is fixed I can take a screenshot ingame from the destination and use that screenshot as an effect for the portal, so when you active the townportal you will see the town in the arch.
I'm still working on this but you get the idea.
All in all progress is being made, slow and steady.
ps. here is one for you that shows the path into the levels beneath the forest, and before you say "hey that reminds me off...." that's because it was purposely designed after it
Skuggasveinn.