Day 36: A Matter of Scale

Missed Friday.  That's two in 33, but still in general A territory overall.

I haven't been working on Hula or Solitaire, so I guess I may as well talk about what I have been working on:  drawing maps an' stuff.

Here's the general schematic of how the world breaks down:

The "flow" is basically from right to left.

Everything's gonna be represented in terms of cards (and tiles and chips, which are just types of cards).  The world will be built, Carcassone-style, out of modular tiles, not unlike RPGtoolkit's boards, but of varying sizes for the various levels of detail at which they will be dealt with.  Here are some of the chips and other tiles that can be placed on land tile cards:

Those houses are roughly 1/4 of a mile on a side.

I guess we're officially dealing in serious real estate, eh?

This is a closeup of the tile diagram in the center of that big wide image at top:

One of these tiles is 3 miles on a side, with a central feature occupying 2.25 square miles.

Hopefully this will give me enough useful levels of detail without requiring ridiculous loading screens.  But I guess we'll jump off that bridge when we get to it.

I drew this area of the map to scale on a magnetic toy.  Such a world would be about a quarter the cirucmference of the real world.  I figure if Minecraft can go up to eight times the surface area of the actual world, so this should be a manageable world size, I think.

This is going to be Noob Island:

Noob Island pictured on left Side, inset of the Northern Wastes.

I'm going to figure out some way, when this is all going, to make it multiplayer.  I know that Hanachi makes long-distance LAN-like playing possible, so this is still in the realm of things I can do.  But that's a bit farther down the line.

I also drew a general body plan for sprite maps:

Generic body plan with optional features!

This is farther down the line still, but it'll be a lot of work to implement, so I figure there's no harm in getting some work done in advance.

I also have stuff about stats & shit, but it's a lot of writing and not fun to look at.  However, I was able to run a fight with just a deck of playing cards, so I think that bodes well for my combat mechanics.