Feature dive: Terrain
I’m sat in the garden on a sunny Sunday morning, wondering what topic to use as a pilot fo a longer blog entry. Figure I may as well go straight to terrain editing, which seems to be the first feature everyone interrupts me on to ask questions!
In Tales of Autumn, players will be able to change the terrain of their ranch to attract new animals, or grow speciality crops.
The original concept was that I wanted players to terraform their ranch to enable different storylines and content, primarily the animals and crops. One of the game’s design goals is that a player shouldn’t be able to have everything at once - they’ll need to make some choices and pick which animals they want to go after - but I also don’t want these choices to be ‘final’. I love the idea of players restarting the game to pursue a different angle, but given the time that usually gets poured into these games, that’s too harsh. Hence the requirement for players to change their terrain at any time they like.
Terrain cursor
Terrain editing mode
I needed a way for players to enter ‘Terrain editing’ mode that didn’t break the game’s core loops, and wasn’t so accessible that players would accidentally change things. Given that I also had an idea for an ‘Engineer NPC’ with a content path around ranch upgrades, a terminal/interactive sign seemed best.
Layers on layers
Once enabled, players can roam the ranch and get access to a ‘Terrain cursor’, which when selected will attempt to lay the desired terrain at the current spot. Different terrains can be layered, meaning that players can aesthetically leave behind the original ranch terrain, and lay water over anything.
Adding up
As the player places their terrain, the ranch keeps track of how many ‘full’ tiles there are of each type. Its Full tiles that are considered when placing crops that only grow in certain soils, or animals that require a minimum amount of their homeland. For example, currently the cactus plant will only grow in a full sand tile, and a deer needs at least 20 full grass tiles.
Layering up terrain
In closing
Outside of my own ramblings, the core inspirations for this feature was the original Viva Pinata game which seems like a lifetime ago, and the more recent ‘Newt's suitcase’ scene in Fantastic Beasts and where to find them. How the feature is today isn’t too far off from my original vision. In the future I think I’ll add a few more biomes (my original notes had 9 biomes!), preset builds, and of course responses to player feedback.
I really like this feature, and hope it goes down well. I tackled it very early on, though I was pretty disheartened as I couldn’t seem to find a relevant tutorial on the topic, and almost packed the whole thing in. It took a few trial and error sessions but once I figured it out I realised I’d see this project through. Maybe I’ll do a GML focus if anyone’s interested.
