Of Scope and Scale

The Plan

Today I dove into the game without much of a plan. I know I have a lot to work on, and I've been keeping pace pretty good (in my opinion). I wasn't really going to do anything too complicated, but I did have some things I'd been mulling over. I'm at the stage where I need to really start thinking about the world and the player's journey. I started a chat up with Gemini and talked through a few things.

The City Scene

One of the first things I worked on was identifying the best way to structure the scene itself in relation to buildings and other world elements. I've decided to maintain each building individually. Any world objects, such as NPCs or interactables, that overlap the building footprint will become part of that building. And the buildings, as well as the world objects that fall outside a building footprint, will be grouped together in the scene structure. Eventually, I'll probably add logical sub-groups, but I don't need that yet. 

FileSystem Structure

This lead me to doing something similar in the actual file system structure of the project. I have a "components" scene folder which I moved my buildings into. Each building is going to have it's own sub-folder because I expect them to grow in complexity. For now, all NPCs are in a shared folder, though will probably get their own later, and all interactables are together. It just makes logical sense to me. Might not be fully the best approach but it should make sense to others if needed.

The City Core Complex

I also began working on my very first building, the City Core Complex. I've got a lot to think about when it comes to this building. It will be the very first look at the world for every player, so it's gotta be good. I also had this idea for a few Easter eggs in my game, and one is related to this first building. This was my first time thinking about scale, in relation to the game world. I have this building, and this texture. At first I thought it was gonna just work, a 1000x1000 texture placed in a simple 48x48 tilemap. And I mean, it did work, though there were some errors.

I cleaned them up, but realized that 1000 pixels, just under 21 tiles, wasn't enough space! I want the city core complex to feel epic, or at the very least grand. I have multiple beats of the opening story happening in here. I expect the player to begin unlocking new abilities and concepts inside this area. So, instead of using this one, 1000x1000 pixel tile, I resized it slightly (exactly 21 tiles squared) and split it up into 441 individual tiles. Now I can paint the entire floor, tile it as big as I need, and still use minimal portions for hallways.

At the moment I'm leaning on the city core complex being at least 42 tiles squared for the main building. I expect to need to have hallways of some sort on the four cardinals. I really should try to use my limited artistic abilities to draw out some concept art work. I'm just not sure how to do it. I have a good idea of how the city will look, but I have issues translating it from my brain to other mediums.

What's Next?

I don't know if I'll keep working on the scene today or if I'll take it easy today. Probably both. . .  I feel like this is going to be one of those things I'm going to keep thinking about. Maybe I commit what I've done now and leave the project open on my screen to mess with as things come to me. I don't really have anything good to show for today, but I will use my Easter egg as the "image" for this post.