Last time we had discussed the move towards an over world where the player can have more meaningful engagements with the world and the story (most of it, completely optional).
This post is to summarize progress made in the over world, specifically the “Grass World” which is the first level of TinyWars.
Expanding the “Grass Village”
Map of the Grass Village (Areas are not laid out 100% to scale)
The grass village is split into several sections that can be viewed in a given “screen” within the game.
- Village Center (Completed Concept Art)
- Food Production Area (Completed Concept Art)
- Graveyard (Completed Concept Art)
- Stump Castle (Not Started)
- House Area (In Progress…)
- Front Gate / Watch Tower (Not Started)
Music
Let’s keep the tradition of releasing a new soundtrack with this song:
This is one of the tracks that might appear in the background of this village.
The Food Production Area
This is what this village is known for; producing food that can be consumed by the village, as well as exported to the various other tiny settlements.
This area might not seem so exciting, but it is significant to the story, and there are some fun side quests to do here.
There isn’t really too much to be said about this area. This is where the tiny people can grow their food in relative peace.
The Housing Area
This was the most tricky to tackle. Primarily because tiny houses are constructed differently from normal houses. Great care needed to be put into the design of the houses to make them feel interesting, realistic, and meaningful.
Resourceful tiny people could build houses out of anything, but the idea is to create houses that seem inviting for these people as well as safe and warm.
The Housing Area has already been sketched out. It is a nice habitat for the tiny people to live happily.
There are too many fine details within this sketch to go over in this post, and I think it would be much more fun for the player to discover it themselves than to explain it all in this post.
The Inside of the Houses
For most of these houses, the player will be able to enter them. That means the inside must be designed as well.
Game Optimization
We plan to return to traditional game mechanics such as tiling systems, repeating objects, etc, to quickly build out interiors of these houses as well as keep asset size and creation low.
However, the outside of these houses are all unique, and I don’t see any other way to do this but to have each house as its own unique asset. The environment and other parts of this world can be generated using tiling and repeating objects, but the buildings will be unique.
When will the Story Demo be ready?
I feel that it is still too early to make a determination on an ETA for the Story Demo.
Pretty much all programming and coding is put on pause while we carefully plan out this game and the story. It would be reckless to put out a date at this point, but we expect to resume programming again later this year.
Thank you for following our development!
