Devlog 2021-05-30

  • Made a lot of headway on a new map

Caves

You know, I was thinking about it. A very, very classic staple of jRPG maps is the Cave. Really, in a lot of ways they’re almost the quintessential dungeon in fantasy stuff in general! I suppose this could probably be traced back to Tolkien’s books – The Hobbit especially involves a great deal of the protagonist grubbing around in caves that aren’t ancient ruins or whatever. Just caves. Since it’s Tolkien, this probably dates back even further; I suspect Beowulf was gallivanting about in caves when he was off killing Grendel and his family.

It seems a little absurd, though, right? When was the last time you were in a cave? If you’re not a professional or hobbiest spelunker, it’s not really something you generally do! Caves are unpleasant places; they’re formed by flowing water which absolutely does not care about making anything resembling a nice safe floor for you to walk in, or making tunnels anything other than a claustrophobic nightmare. Maybe caves are over-done, you know?

So anyway, the next area I’m working on in Black Mountain is a cave.

The Shorthand

So I fell into a trap of my own devising. I had gotten pretty quick at drawing the maps I’d been working on, and foolishly believed this means that I could just steamroll through and become an unstoppable map-drawing machine. Unfortunately I failed to account for the fact that my speed was based on the fact that I had developed a quick shorthand for drawing the forest maps I was working on.

Then I started drawing a cave and realized that I have no clue how to draw a cave. They’re terrible! I’m not convinced any RPG has ever featured a realistic cave (see my rant above). So I had to actually force myself to do real work and figure out the shorthand I would be using.

(As a reminder, the stuff I’m drawing now is not a final version of anything – the entire goal of this current “draft” version of the game is to just stand up a beginning-to-end version as quick as possible*, so I can start evaluating it as a full game and I can start showing it to others. Then, either through my own work or those aforementioned “others”, we’ll start making it look good.)

Anyway, I started and re-started several times on my first map. Just like with the rest of my maps (see the process discussion back in https://verge-rpg.com/topic/35/gruedorf-kildorf-s-devlog/8) I started with a quick, dirty sketch of the area, and then resized it to full size for the level drawing. I ended up trying several approaches before I eventually found one that struck the right balance of fast and readable.

A screenshot of the current cave style.

I’m still not completely happy with it, but as I keep having to remind myself, it took drawing three or four full forest maps before I was happy with that shorthand.

Have a good week!


* I’m actually doing an awful job of doing it as quickly as possible. I’m taking far longer than necessary on the art, but I’m hoping that the time spent will translate into less time trying to explain incoherent chicken scratches to an artist, later.