Finally back to content creation, I’ve made a lot of progress expanding the map over the past couple of weeks. There are now two player starting cities, two open world areas, and an additional survival event map.
Player Starting Cities
In Defend The Night, players will be able to own and oversee their own city. My goal is for the city to be highly customizable and upgraded over time as the players advance. Upgrades include physical expansion of the city, structure upgrades (walls, buildings, gates, etc), defense upgrades (guards, towers), and cosmetics. The initial customization includes choosing a starting city biome, intro music, weather, and time of day. There are currently two biome options, Island or Desert, and I will soon be expanding that to 4 by adding Forest and Tundra. These cities will also physically be located in different areas of the world.
I’ve added in these options to the character creation process and now carry these selections over into the game.
The options selected above will define what each player that visits the city will experience. This includes the music, preferred time, and preferred weather settings. Here’s a preview of the basic island city template:
Boat Travel
From the player island city, it would be quite a long ways to swim for the player to reach the adjacent open world area. To make this a bit more practical and enjoyable, the island city can now be left by boat. The boat will activate about 15 seconds after a player steps on board, and it will drop the player off at the dock of the open world coastal area before returning to pier. In addition to the movement sequences, I’ve been working to add buoyancy and colliders to the boat to give it a realistic look and feel.
Expanding the Map
Aside from the player starting cities, I’ve added in two new open world areas. One is an oasis environment immediately off of the player desert city, and the other is a coastal plains environment off of the player island city. These will be generally lower level areas where newer players can explore the open world and engage in their first combat encounters.
Wrapping Up
You’ll also notice in a couple of the videos that I’ve been playing around with some new movement animations. The character movement systems will be getting a dramatic overhaul in the coming updates, but this is a good start that feels a lot more natural than the prior animations. I’ll also be diving back into the combat and spell systems to introduce some much needed new gameplay content, and the game map will continue to expand with many areas, points of interest, two new starting cities, and possibly even the first dungeon. Thanks for reading, and check out my Twitter for more frequent content updates.
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