Player Interfaces

One of the things I feel is most important about game design is that the interface used by the player should be easy enough to figure out without needing to read a thick user manual.  In fact, I want Lands of Adventure to be put together well enough that a user manual isn't even necessary at all.  The game is littered with helpful hints and obvious clues as to how it works.  This is not because I think people are dumb or anything...I just think that *I* wouldn't want to play a game with a terrible interface...so I'm certainly not going to torture the people who will be playing this game with one.

Simple and easy to use.

I'm not going to say that the interface I've designed is original by any means.  If anything, I have borrowed ideas from the folks who came before me and wrote all those great CRPGs of yore.  People who have played SSI's series of Gold-Box games will find this layout familiar and intuitive.

Getting a quest from the town mayor.

I think that it's a good thing that I'm not trying to reinvent the wheel.  Paying homage to the old-school CRPGs means taking what worked from them and implementing them in this game.  It's what I hope players of those games will like about this one.  I mean, I personally would have loved it if people had been building games like this over the years...but there are, sadly, not many that I can name.

The overland map, showing the areas that can be visited.

The scope of the world isn't very large.  It takes place in a village called Waystop and the areas that surround it.  When an area opens up and is available for the characters to visit, a "Travel" button will appear.  If a quest is in progress, hovering over the button will remind the player *why* they want to travel there.  In the example above, the mayor has given a quest to go to Darkfell Swamp and eliminate the Goblin Chieftain and his followers, and it's easy to see what's going on.  If a player leaves a game in progress and comes back four days later, or if they have multiple locations that they can travel to, I think this will make it easier for them to make a choice of where they want to go.

And now, for the 3D exploration window...

Exploring the old keep in Darkfell Swamp.

It's still a work in progress, but it's functional.  The player can move around in the dungeons, and events will trigger based on where they are.  The code wasn't as hard to figure out as I thought...but getting the walls to line up right...that was some serious work.

At this point, there's no auto-map feature in the game (there may be one later, it just depends on how hard it will be to implement).  This particular dungeon isn't very big, so I don't imagine anyone would get lost in it, but others may be larger.

Then again, I guess the "old-school" way would be to dig out some graph paper and map the heck out of it....but that was never one of my favorite things to do.  And, since my goal is to program the kind of game I would want to play, we'll see how it all works out.

Encountering some goblins.

Just like games that have come before, exploring dungeons and locales will trigger events.  One of the freedoms I have in programming the game myself is that I can program *any* kind of event I want.  I'm not limited by what can be done like I would be if I used a CRPG development engine (like Unlimited Adventures, Neverwinter Nights, or RPG Maker VX).  The sky isn't even the limit.  I can go really outside the box and do something different if I wanted.

But, even if I do that, I will still keep things as close as possible to the way things were done in those old-school CRPGs.  After all, isn't that the point of this whole project?

Until next time...