https://youtu.be/keDDSjmUYJg
We’re making much bigger game maps for WolfQuest 3: Anniversary Edition, but even so, they’ve got to come to an end at some point. What’s beyond that? This is one of the complications of our 24-hour time cycle, since we can’t use simple, static skydomes for distant views. Instead, we’ve made a huge landscape to surround the game map. The game map is 7km by 7km; this larger surrounding map is 42x42. It’s very simple, low resolution mesh and textures, with just enough detail to look good at a distance. You can see it in the video, though we are still tweaking and refining it.
But of course, with these distant lands luring you on, at some point you’ll probably come near the edge of the game map. What happens then? Most games create obvious obstacles like cliffs or rivers. We can do some of that. In the Amethyst map, the steep banks on the north shore of the Lamar River will serve nicely as an obstacle, and in Slough Creek, the bluffs above the valley will definitely block players. Unfortunately, the other three sides of each map don’t have anything like that— the Lamar and Slough Creek valleys extend for many miles upstream and downstream, unobstructed. Since our maps represent the real terrain of Yellowstone National Park, so we can’t just add in convenient barriers.
The simplest solution is what we did in the old game: invisible walls. With the new wolf territory system, we now have a better justification for blocking progress, and we’ll show a warning when you hit one of those walls: “You’ve heading deeper into the Prospect Peak pack’s territory! Better turn back now.”
What we’d really like to do is have stranger wolves block your progress, but:
• We’ve built a robust naturalistic system for stranger wolf packs and forcing a stranger wolf to appear in front of you if you approach the map edge would require a separate (and rather kludgy) system.
• Even if a stranger did block your way, we’d still need to forcibly prevent you from moving forward (as with the strangers along Slough Creek during the Journey mission), so it’s still an artificial blockade.
• This doesn’t contribute to gameplay, so we don’t want to build a whole new system just for it.
But perhaps there are other ways we can finesse the issue of map edges. We’d love to hear some good ideas — post them below!