I think I've finished my first two practice maps. Flora and Fauna was an attempt to make an arena style map that takes advantage of large sized enemies and small diagonal openings. I tried to limit space in such a way that whirlwinds wouldn't allow the large enemies to get redistributed anywhere but where they're supposed to be. I also included High HP monsters so that firestorming won't net you an instant win. These things were done in the hopes that the design would cause a couple common cheese tactics to be less effective. In doing so, I'm less concerned with letting a player use their own party, rather than assigning them one out of the premade NPCs, so feel free to poke at it and let me know if you found something that made it feel significantly easier than what you normally fight. There is a victory point, and an acid fiend with telekinesis, so if the player takes too long poking around, they will lose. However, not every enemy needs to be defeated to win, so capturing the VP for yourself probably shouldn't be your priority. Just bait the enemies into advantageous locations and club them as fast as you can. I think my first piece of self-critique is that the sand under the trees doesn't look quite right. The entire time I was building it I was admiring how cool it looked, but at the very end after adding the monsters, I realized that somehow the combination of sand color and the awful yellow walls creates this really painful color combination Yellow/green/white. I'm not happy with this. :/ My second piece of critique is that I really need to learn to name my boards something less generic than "testing". Man do I feel stupid for that one. Water Path is my first try at something "big". I tried to make it compartmentalized so that whirlwinding won't net you as much as it could. Also, all enemy deaths are necessary for victory, so skipping an enemy still means you've got to come back for it eventually. The story is that there's a demon (the hell bug) that's provoked all the fire sources on the map into becoming enraged fire spirits, and these spirits have in turn panicked the local tree population. To shut the demon down, your party has to wind their way out to a river shrine, killing all the fire spirits and trees along the way. It's an odd mix of fire and combustible. After testing it out, I feel that making your way forward feels a little like slowly progressing trench warfare. Probably a bit too slow for some player's tastes, but I found the change of map size rather refreshing. It was also nice to catch my breath before taking on the boss at the end. Sometimes it seems like this game's bosses start out just a little too close. This is my first time trying to upload this sort of file, so if I've done it wrong give me some tips how to do it right, please. I've poked through a few threads on making maps, but I haven't found one yet that describes this final step, so I can't be sure I've done it quite right.
Gotcha. I'll get on that in a sec. Bear in mind the second one is over a screen in size, so I'll leave the boss out of the picture... dramatically.
Flora & Fauna Water Path (Those corner bits of grass from the water doodads really stand out because of what they do to the wire frame. I'm fond of using them, but I really don't like that effect they have. I wish that could get fixed. because the final result looks really tacky.)
I managed to upload everything necessary, didn't I? I'd hate to have left out an important file or something...
seems all good, actualy u dont need upload the board file, just the scn file. anyway after i try it i say something more, but those really look interesting
Good. I guess I'm just really nervous about getting this wrong somehow and wasting your time. I couldn't help myself after I noticed that you can shape the map like a doughnut, so I made one more. Good practice against parries.
Just tryed Flora and Fauna and i got utterly destroyed, my pvp deckw as no match for that pve map,and didnt help that i did a wwe and all enemys ended up near the vp,cloistering it. Good design, just dont understant the roots coming from the walls of the arena, thats a hazzard , the middle part is a bit cloistered too but really good design edited: this is madness, interesting design with the hole on the center, just a small note, twhen you end a wall use the blocks called "wallend" better looking and doesnt seem the wall as left unfinished
So whirlwind still had an effect on the first map... and it was a negative one? That's kind of cool, if you don't mind me being happy that it caused you problems. That level of intensity was definitely something I was after. The Lord Stafford adventure in the SP campaign left me with an important impression that if players are going to be using WW, then try and make the biggest room the one that players are trying to get the enemies out of. Then using a WW has the greatest likelihood of placing enemies where you don't want them to be, and you're not going to have and easy time getting them out. This is Madness was done as a fun 300 recreation, so I was mostly after the satisfying feeling that comes from dumping a ton of guys into the hole in the center of town. I think that if this becomes a popular way of placing the upper doodads for enemy removal, we may start seeing a few more maps that make a point of enemy bodies landing "where they would have landed when they died". When I used to tabletop roleplay, we always left the dead pieces on the board like this to increase the immersion a bit, so I'd like to play games where as Gary or I lose characters while fighting on the edge of a cliff, we dramatically fall off to the bottom, or over the side of a bridge to rest beneath it, rather than simply removing the piece entirely and setting it by the edge of the board. I'll see if I can find that wall segment you mentioned. I used the ones that I did because I wanted a bit of variety, so if that resulted in me picking one you felt was ugly than that's good feedback to consider for next time. I think that I see the one you mean, and I may have done a poor job with it. I didn't want the map to become humongous like the last one, so I was specifically cutting houses in half to make things seem more reasonable. Was it fun or annoying that the VP were separated by the big hole in the middle? I thought it would be fun to force the player to chose whether to cover them all or gang up on a single side.
All this thinking about whirlwinds gave me an idea. Let me know if this sounds interesting. The sinkhole And adventure for a standard party that specializes in whirlwinds and teleports. The town you're currently visiting has remained peaceful for generations. It's population has turned to the study of magic and higher learning, creating an air of sophistication and comfort that few other communities can enjoy. A nearby goblin warlord has learned of this town of luxury, and hopes to claim it in a bold, single blow. From the cliffside bordering the town, his band of minions cause an avalanche that rains straight down onto the village common area, crushing most of it and thrusting the remainder straight down into a natural series of caves below ground. You have somehow survived the catastrophe, but immediately come to the realization: you're trapped underground! What's worse, they're in the process of burying you alive and you're running out of air! Show those goblin mercenaries that they picked the wrong wizards to mess with. Beat back the enemy scavenging parties and dig your way back to freedom! Warning: This mission includes completely walled-in areas. Normal forms of movement won't get you out. It's strongly recommended you formulate a plan that allows you to reach your enemies and their objective through magical means.
