Hi everyone,
In this dev-blog, we will talk about the overworld incidents in Terra Randoma.
After some dungeon crawling and fighting with monsters till your last health potion, you step out to overworld and wilderness adventure begins.
Terra Randoma is a world full of curiosities! Wheel of fortune is turned with every step you take on the overworld. It may bring you a bandit ambush or an abandoned cart, perhaps you get to meet a traveling merchant or some curious personality.
The overworld has four types of tiles at this stage: plain tiles, forest tiles, mountain tiles, and the water tiles. And there is a different danger level for each: The tiles around the settlements are “safe”, meaning the chances of dangerous encounter are very small. The plain tiles are more dangerous as you move away from the settlements but are always safer than the forest and the mountain tiles. Nothing happens on water tiles yet, but we will add pirates and sea monsters soon and will make sure to keep you updated on that! It is also safer at day time than night time.
So what happens when you encounter an enemy? The answer to that was “fight” until recently. We then added skill check options. So now, for example if you encounter a bandit, you can choose between several options like intimidate, haggle, or pickpocket meaning, if your thievery skill checks, you can pay the extortion he demands with his own coins!
If your skill check fails, or if you decide to engage in a fight anyway, you will emerge in a battlefield facing the enemies you came across to. These battlefields are all procedurally generated. Like we explained before in the article about combat system, your character in Terra Randoma has a sprint ability and you may actually use that to escape from the battlefield through the exit tile which is always behind the enemies.
Enemy encounters may happen while you camp as well, but let’s leave camping to another dev-blog.
As mentioned above, not all encounters include enemies. You may be lucky enough to meet one of the traveling merchants happy to sell items at more favorable prices than the shops. There may be a princess whose caravan is stuck in the mud. It may be a trap or not. Or you may come across an NPC suffering under a fallen trunk and choose to help -or steal his belongings.
There are also mysterious locations like some old castle ruins or a “shrine of the forgotten god” which you may explore and loot (and find some secret artifacts for one of the meta game goals).
Re-playability is one of the most important features we aim at. We are trying to ensure that the players experience a full sense of adventure and can discover new things each time they play, so doing our best to add as many incidents (with different solutions and outcomes) as we possibly can, so that “the story that emerges as you play” is different each time you play. This article covers only a few incidents. There are and will be many more.