Hedgerow Hall

by Hedgemistress
Hedgerow Hall
Serious role-playing-oriented game world, with animals.

The front of the Hall!

ID:1811360
 
Mar 16 2015, 9:46 am


Here are some animals chilling around the front entrance to the Hall.

Please excuse the trees. I know their canopies are needlessly blocky even given the tile nature of the graphics. I will be using autojoin tiles to replace the rounded square blocks currently in use.

Now that I'm looking at it, I kind of wish I would have posed one of the animals underneath the tree that the squirrel is in so you could better see the point of the multi-tile trees.

I have not put the climbing skill in, so right now only squirrels (who can climb trees as a free action, essentially) can get up into trees. The rabbit had to jump up to the roof.
Mar 16 2015, 9:50 am
That perspective is really strange. The trees are top-on, but the wall for the Hall looks 3/4ths.

Mixing perspective like that is pretty confusing.
Mar 16 2015, 10:53 am
It's more of an exploded top-down view (i.e., top with *all* sides visible) than a three-quarters one, though it's hard to tell when you can only see one side of the building. Think the dungeon screens in the original Legend of Zelda. The effect will hopefully be more apparent when the trees have distinct sides, and of course by the time a player comes out the front door and sees this massive object, they'll have seen the individual rooms of the hall laid out in the same perspective.
Mar 16 2015, 10:54 am
(If you're wondering why this perspective, it's to allow for climbing in all directions while keeping an overall 2D map).
Mar 16 2015, 11:06 am
Also, long term, I would like to get some wall icons that progressively foreshorten in the correct direction in order to give more of the proper effect. It's not high on the initial priority list, though, since it won't have any effect on coding or gameplay but would just be an effect made in the map editor. Very few walls outside the hall will have more than one tile of height to begin with.
Mar 16 2015, 11:08 am
That makes a lot more sense.
Mar 16 2015, 12:48 pm
The more I look at it, though, the less I think it actually works. In the interior, where you can see four walls, yes. On the outside, a lot less.

I think I'm going to go back to one of my ideas for the last relaunch attempt and make the Hall subterranean, or at least built into the side of a hill. Then I can replace the external walls with slopes (which makes sense that you can see on a top-down view, because they're horizontal as well as vertical). Any stone walls found in the overworld will be an almost straight top-down view to match the other terrain, with rocky/brick footings around the edge to let you know what it is.
Mar 16 2015, 1:01 pm
On third thought, I'm going to stick to my plan of tabling all serious questions of improving the aesthetics until the game is more solidly "there".

For now I'm just going to knock a couple of blocks of height off the hall to make the difference less dramatic.