This means each of the rooms have to be made available in both a past and a present version. And speaking of the floor visuals, how would we even go about designing an Arcade floor of an area that's more of a town than any of the previous areas you've progressed through?
To sort this out, I had a long meeting with Teddy where we sketched and discussed the various ways we could handle this.
In conclusion, we've decided to make the floors in a very different way compared to the others. For the other floors, each room background is either very designed by me, with variations to give the user an impression of there being more rooms than there actually is (Flying Fortress, Mount Bloom etc), or they are fully generated by the engine that puts a bunch of trees in a circle on top of a basic background (Evergrind Fields, Seasonne, etc). For Tai Ming, we're going to do a mix of the two.
We decided that each outdoor room of Tai Ming will consist of a plain grass background, upon which we'll put various things that will serve to block the screen so that you can't move further than the square where you'll be fighting. These things will include various fences, mountain walls, streams of water and houses, either ones you will enter or closed ones that will only serve to block your way forward.
Each of these items will be generated into the game by the engine, but they will have to be handmade by me to fit into each situation. For instance, there needs to be a way for a horizontal and vertical fence/stream/mountain wall to connect, and they need to be able to work with each other - a fence must be able to connect to the mountain wall, for instance.
To make these floors coherent we'll frame them with the mountain, meaning the the bottom, far right/left and topmost floors will have a corresponding mountain wall - it will be in the upper parts of the topmost floors, signifying that you cannot go further north than this. We believe this will give the floors a sense of you progressing through Tai Ming much like it works in Story Mode, you're passing through a town that's inside the mountain. Because there's a lot of water in Tai Ming's second zone and we thought it would make the rooms a more interesting look, there will be streams here and there that you can pass over (in some rooms) by bridges, that will also be made by me but generated into the game by the engine as it creates each floor.
So basically, instead of painting whole rooms, I will spend a lot of time making and piecing together many, many small parts, that need to work both on their own and be able to connect with others as they get generated by the game!
As for the indoor rooms, they will (for now) be single room living areas in a bunch of variations, but with entrances and exits in the same place: if you enter a house from the south you'll exit it in the north, and if you enter a house from the right you'll exit it to the left. Since we've already dealing with quite complex backgrounds we thought we'd keep the indoor houses simple. This way we don't have to make a ton of variations of the house sprites (the outodoor ones) that would have to look different if the house is L-shaped or longer than one room. Now we can focus on giving each of the exits variations through color and design rather than the shape, which would also end up affecting the other pieces made for the outdoor areas.
Creating these floors properly will definitely be a challenge, and more on the technical side than what we normally do, but we believe this will make these floors look the best they can. Our other options would be to make a ton of pre-rendered rooms (a bunch with the mountain wall to the bottom, a bunch with the wall to the left, etc) or lose the coherency of where the mountain floors and walls connect, and we all agree that just wouldn't be as nice.
In other words, expect a post or two full with tiny parts and ways of connecting them! ;)
This is against the whole formula, but what if instead of making Tai Ming into rooms as such, you make like a mini town (shaped like a vertical rectangle or something?) and have the player travel upwards through the outside area, to fight monsters and then be cut off by the walls (the ones shown up there^^) and have them forced to take a path into a building (which could be dilapidated or new it depends) and then go through buildings until they reach outside again. In essence, it would be the players job to go from the bottom of the town to the top (as in from the bottom of the rectangle to the top) by travelling outside and inside of Tai Ming-esque buildings. I don't know how you would put it all together, but this portion of Arcade Mode could be more structured and detailed than the rest, so we aren't fighting through rooms that are just variations of eachother.
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