Map
Landscape is the whole area of the game screen which contains the island with seaweed(grass) and dirt and the sea. The main character survives on the island and fights the enemies to protect the crystal. He should also be able to build infrastructure which would be placed on the grass tiles (on the island).
The initial island size is 5x5 tiles. As the crystal is updated, more blocks of land can appear. The main character cannot walk off the island as they cannot swim. Tile size was decided to be - 500 x 269 pixels
When the terrain is called to be made, initialisation of different ground tiles are completed. These are passed to the fill function which places the tiles onto the map in the correct spots. The below functions are within the TerrainFactory.java file.
fillTiles is the main function for filling in the map. Within itself, it calls fillLand, fillCliffs and fillWater.
fillLand fills in the centre 5 blocks of the map with grass tiles.
For fillCliff, see Cliff Generation.
fillWater places a water tile on the rest of the map. It looks for any tile that is ‘null’, once it does it fills it.
fillCliffs runs in two for loops. The first for loop sets the cliff corners for each side of the island
The second for loop places the dirt on the underside of the island, to give the illusion of the island being above sea level.
The world border is generated by the function private void spawnWorldBorders() in ForestGameArea.java
Within the function, it gets the current map and iterates over each tile. If the tile fits a certain criteria, it becomes a border to the island.
The design process started off with the studio agreeing to have a sloped land for playable area almost like a hill. The crystal would be present at the top of the hill and add more land at the foot of the hill as the crystal was upgraded. At night, the enemies would spawn at the foot of the hill and make their way upwards to destroy the crystal. If the crystal was destroyed or attacked, the water would rise destroying the built infrastructure and engulfing a part of the land.
Only the bottom two edges of the land would expand as the top two edges would be fixed to give it a fake 3D slope look using only two dimensions. The player would then be able to climb down cliffs through a ladder or a fleet of stairs near the cliff section.The land at the foot of the hill would be surrounded by water and the land at the top of the hill would be surrounded by a background resembling the sky.
The green areas -> grass, land to walk on.
The blue area bottom -> sea, the blue area top -> sky.
The brown part -> cliffs.
1, 2, 3 are the different tiles to design for an isometric game with 2D.
Later, the studio discussed and changed the way the landscape worked. The final version decided for sprint 1 would be an island expanding on all 4 sides as the crystal is upgraded after each night. The enemies would spawn at the outer parts of the land and attack the crystal in the middle. The outer land would disappear as if falling into the water, making the water level come closer towards the centre as the crystal is attacked or damaged.
The design process for the art consists of a few questions that the team came up with to incorporate a common man’s(user/gamer) perspective. The questions are
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Have you played pixelated games?
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close your eyes, think as if you are in the Atlantis- What do you see?
2.1 Is Atlantis under the water or above the water?
- Now, remove all the objects on land(rocks, buildings, etc), imagine you are on a plain surface on Atlantis, what do you see? (Depends what interviewee sees)
3.1. (Cont.)What colours are those? Could you describe them?
3.2. How far is the <answer from Q3> away from you?
4.What are you standing on?
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Do you see plants or grass or even something? Use your imagination.
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Then what do you see on the dirt/soil?
The ground would have grass depending how long the land was above sea level. The people imagined themselves standing on light coloured sand. Seaweed around with less trees and a lot of shrubs. Could see creatures in the sea. Dolphins jumping in and out of the water. Could see some crabs crawling into their shells. Huge waves crashing into the rocks .
Dirt:
