Losing Perspective

While Jared has been busy refining and building up the Asciilands engine (now with rudimentary combat!) I've been starting to flesh out our palette of sprites and tilesets beyond the basicTerrain.ts of testIsland. Before too long, we'll have all the video game staples: grassland, forest, desert, jungle, snow world, swamp. The challenge will be to create and use them in a way that doesn't just feel inspired by the forestworlds, desertworlds and iceworlds of video games past.

I think part of the solution involves getting a better sense of what these places actually are like outside of, say, Minecraft. So today I decided to learn about swamps, and bogs, and muskeg, and bog mats.

The swamp land will probably be closer to the beautiful alien landscapes muskeg creates than traditional video game swamps. With swamp monsters.

With apologies to National Geographic

Bog mats probably won't feature in Asciilands, but they are incredible:

From Written in Stone; the lake is 20 feet deep

In any case, I've finished work on a very videogame-y test area that swaps to two dimensions. Even though everything works exactly the same as anywhere else in the game, abandoning the isometric perspective makes everything feel like a Super Nintendo era platformer. I'm not sure if it's a good fit for Asciilands, but the effect is interesting. Have a look: