Esoteric Update #250 - Donjon (Hon~Hon~)

Update time, then?

Well, a few things happened over the last week, but I want to focus on just one thing. And this is mainly because I just don't feel well right now. The bed tempts me, I desire as many eeps as possible.

So yeah, working on the navigation and getting it working with everything else, it turned out that we might actually have a bit of a problem. It turns out that pure text-based navigation, without some kind of conceit, is just very hard to follow. Usually, this would be something like describing movement purely in terms of cardinal directions (go south and all that), but I don't want to do that, and as such, I turned towards something else.

A visual navigation aid that also just happens to be styled as a hand-drawn map:

So, this is actually a lot less trivial than it might seem. Though I get that probably seeing something like this is just yet another disappointment with what I post.

In any case, let's go over the features:

• SVG driven;
• Non-diegetic (the map isn't something the player character is drawing; this allows for a lot more freedom, like changes to parts of the map that dynamically show, hide, alter or overlay elements);
• Dynamically constructed (tell the system what's where; this allows the whole style of the map to be adjusted without invalidating existing maps);
• Double fog-of-war (sections of the map can be hidden, and the bounds of the map automatically adjust only to the visible parts);
• Integration with existing systems (you can see the example making use of handwriting and ink blobs from the document builder... not to mention that it's based on the draggable panel from mind maps);
• Gridless, non-orthogonal (there's no underlying grid, and nothing needs to be orthogonally aligned; the placement is truly freeform);
• Sticks to the player (as you open the map, it always tries to place your current location as close to the middle of the screen as possible, given the map's size).

Here's an example of how the map might look during different phases of exploration:

These maps are meant to go on top of the graph-based representation of the locations you explore. This specific location is intended for demonstration purposes. This is important because I don't mind spoiling what's happening here to reveal more about what we are working on. We have always held things under wraps to not spoil people on future content. However, we will absolutely do it for this "content" to demonstrate what we're doing.

This will likely be the topic of the next few posts as we get more and more of the functionality hooked together and working, leading to a playable demo of the exploration.