Building and Polishing the Jungle-forest-swamp

denseForest began as an attempt to make a swampy area. When that didn't progress particularly well - travelling big wet fields isn't actually very exciting - I started working on a woodlands area instead. When the woodlands ended up looking fairly bland, I mixed in some of my work from the swamp with some jungle vines and Mayan-style temples, and the area started to feel like a place worth exploring.

I think there's a lesson here: mixing together common tropes in uncommon ways can create things that feel greater than the sum of their parts. Many of my favourite films and TV shows did just that. Firefly combined science fiction with a Wild West feel, Awake combined a police procedural with an exploration of grief and travel between alternate realities, and Cube combined the genres of low-budget sci-fi and horror with maths puzzles, philosophical musings and an extraordinarily poor script. The rule seems true of videogames, too; Dead Space earns its unique atmosphere through combining sci-fi and horror clichés. To me, the Asciilands jungle-forest-swamp feels much more interesting (and unexpectedly cohesive) than any of my attempts at making a jungle, forest or swamp.

The first problem came up when somebody with an uncommon form of red-green colourblindness tried to play the map.

The map is primarily made up of grass, trees and water. While I could easily tell apart the shade of green used on the grass from the shade of green used by the forest, they differed only in hue. Take away the ability to distinguish between this subtle difference, and the map ends up looking like this:

To say the least, this makes the forest tricky to navigate. This is especially obvious at the top of the image, where it's nearly impossible to tell at a glance where the grass ends and the treeline begins.

Of course, there's a quick fix - just make the grass darker and reduce the strength of the filter used to make the map look darker and murkier. In the long term, we will have to keep the darkness of different tiles in mind to make sure that Asciilands is playable even with colour vision deficiency.

The revised tileset

This wasn't, however, the only problem.

The layout of denseForest started out looking like this:

The Original denseForest layout

You would begin on the part at the top right corner. The various temples all ended up in the same chamber, allowing for quick travel between locations in the area.

Naturally, there is a secret passage behind the waterfall.

Yet even though the layout of the map was fairly simple, playtesters would spend a lot of time backtracking, getting lost, and having difficulty realising exactly where on the map they were and where they had or hadn't visited. The problem was that most parts of the map looked the same as most of the other parts. You walk by similar rivers, through similar swamps and between similar trees, occasionally coming across similar temples.

One particular problem players had was a sense of disorientation on exiting the temple; each of the temples and surrounding areas looked very similar. To fix this, the next draft of the map was bigger and more complex, but also adjusted to make each area and each temple feel a bit more unique:

The updated denseForest layout

You still spend a lot of time walking by rivers and through forests, but there are more points of interest than before. There are overgrown, ruined temples, more variety in how temples are built, more variation in elevation, and more routes to quickly navigate the map. The water at the south of the map has been set below the grass, helping distinguish it from the rivers further to the north:

The temples have been reworked to make each a little more distinguishable from the others:

To make it obvious that the waterlogged swamp tiles can be traversed, you are forced to walk over some near the beginning of the map to access the rest of the area:

Finally, there's a new cave that you can pass through to access an area that would otherwise have been blocked off:

Of course, much remains to be done. The area as it exists in the moment is just a blank template to be tweaked, adjusted and populated with NPC's, enemies and loot when we begin putting together the full game. But in the meantime, the Asciilands world has become a little bit bigger and a little more varied.