This one will be talking about new maps! (including some screenshots!)
Believe it or not, making a new map in Murder Mansion is hands-down the single most time-consuming aspect of development. Not only in brainstorming and designing outside of BYOND, but also once I get to work within Dream Maker. So I honestly didn't get as many new maps created as I would have liked to, but here they are!
Long ago (the last time I was doing any active work with BYOND) I was working on some new MM maps. I made a couple of teaser posts about them. You might remember:
The Train: ID:105390 (link to original post, containing screenshots)
This map is long and narrow (like a train! weird!) Most of the cars only have a one-tile walkway, so it leads to traffic jams. However, for a bit more space, the end of each car has a ladder to reach the roof. You can walk the entire length of the train on the roof of each car.
The Neighborhood: ID:105176 (link to original post, containing screenshots)
The post that first previewed this map explains it pretty well, but here goes again:
This map is similar to the campgrounds map, in that it is a mostly outdoors map, with some individual buildings. Only, in this case, the buildings are houses (12 of them, one in each of the MM bedroom colors) arranged along a neighborhood street. The map is split into two halves by an intersection, creating two blocks of 6 houses each.
Each house is in a fenced-in yard, with the only access to each yard being the driveway and front walkway.
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Then, if you'll also recall, I ran into some issues (first, BYOND did something to my neighborhood map, that ended up swapping out tiles and objects for other items; I made a post about it; then my computer at the time had a harddrive failure, and I lost my progress)
So, I've re-created these two maps for the coming update (including the change of making the neighborhood map a fall scene, with brown grass, and fall leaves)
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And now for a couple of completely brand-new additions!
The Ski Lodge:
Mostly just an excuse for me to add a Snow weather type, the Ski Lodge is a simple and compact map of a log cabin, ski resort type of place.
This is the mystery map in the screenshot in my graphical improvements post.
The building itself consists of a large square "great room" area with a central fireplace, surrounded by the 12 bedrooms, and utility rooms, like bathrooms, kitchen, dining room, etc.
The lodge has a wrap-around porch, with various ski-logde-y ammenities. The grounds consist of a thick evergreen forest, with the slopes (complete with non-functioning chair lift) to the north.
And here! Have some random screenshots!
Edit: I was just running a test game on this map, and here's a crazy scene of the carnage that had built up:
(Surprise Map):
And here we have the last new map. I'm not saying much more about it now.
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Now, here comes why I wanted to make a post about subscriptions before I started posting about the new content. Two of these new maps (I'm not quite decided which) will be subscriber-only.
I had wanted to create two or three more on top of these for this update (some free, some subscription), and in fact, I have one or two more in-process (and a whole list behind those of brainstormed additions), but I just don't have the time to get them finished before my unofficial deadline for this update.
So, please know that I do plan to release further Murder Mansion updates after this one, and the focus of those will mostly be new maps and other content (aside from the usual stuff, like bug fixes).
And, like I mentioned in the subscription post, I plan to release both free and subscription-only content with every update. So the next release might be a "map pack", with one or two free maps, and one or two subscriber maps.
