Musing over world map additions for Driftwurld

[Callan S.]

I'm mulling over what to have on my world map, now I've got it up.

I was thinking to start off with, some tough monsters wander the landscape. I'm thinking if you step on a square with one, it wont lock you into combat - it'll run a few rounds automatically and then you can move away. Or perhaps you can move away but it cost extra time to do so. You can spend time to scout surrounding squares to see if one is around.

I guess I want them to be in the way of taking trade goods from point on the map to another. The monsters should be annoying and hated. Probably they should make trading slow in some way, that weapons and armour upgrades can latter remove.

[Jackolantern]

Sounds pretty cool! If you wanted to make players fear monsters, you could make small prey animals/monsters that won't hurt the players, and move them around on the map. When people see the prey animals moving, they know that the movement patterns of the monsters are coming, too, and to get out of that area unless they want to fight. Basically you would be making an small ecosystem for the monsters.

As far as the monsters affecting trade, if you have NPC trade, you could have trade-routes that the NPCs use to move goods. If monsters move into those trade routes, the NPCs will run out of the items they have to trade until the monsters are cleared out. It could be a way to get players involved into killing the monsters if the only NPC who carries X is out because their trade route is too dangerous. If the monster infestation is too much for one players, it could also be a social experience as the player tries to get others to help kill the monsters and clear the trade-routes.

[Callan S.]

In a good way that sounds like mine sweeper "Okay, so there are fleeing villagers in this square and fleeing buffalo over in this square, so that must mean over in this square something real, real bad is waiting!"!

[Jackolantern]

Haha, yeah! I guess it would depend on the size of the map. If it was small enough to consider as a whole, then you could basically have a Minesweeper-style mechanic lol. Even if it was huge then you could maybe do that on a local level, too.

[Callan S.]

I'm thinking it might work with a largish map. Your basically spending time units to scout around. Then you try and remember where the monsters are because you don't want to waste more time scouting (and say they move at most one square a day, your knowledge from yesterday counts for today to a degree). It sounds interesting to play and cat and mouse-ish. I'm seriously considering it now!

Then latter on, the PC's arm up and kick the butt of monsters they had to tip toe around and that villagers had to run from before!

[Jackolantern]

That sounds pretty cool I don't think I have seen another game quite like that!

[Callan S.]

It's been awhile, because integrating code into code that already exists isn't as fun as writing up a fresh new page.

Anyway, have made code for when you run into an Ostrosaurus, code for a chance at escaping (basically giving you one chance at moving to an adjacent map square once you've escaped). Then I made code that downloads all ostrosaur positions, spawns more on the far right of the map and they randomly move, slowly migrating right across the map, creating danger squares all over the place. I'll have it that they move once a week.

Still a few bits more to go, but almost there!

[Jackolantern]

Awesome! Can't wait to see it