Journal

Our recent development effort has been focused on developing the art and tilemaps for the Last Dream II World Map. The World Map had previously been laid out, but only with the prior stock art and older engine. Our focus so far has been:

• Ocean backdrop – 1000 tiles x 500 tiles (~4x larger than the Last Dream I World Map). The ocean also features a shader that creates a wave-like motion.
• Drawing and filling the outline of four continents: Thule (lower left), Meropis (lower center), Agartha (lower right), and Mu (upper right).
• Adding mountains (both Rocky and Snow-capped) to continents
• Adding forests (both deciduous and evergreen). So far, these have only been added to Meropis and Agartha.
• Adding interior rivers and lakes. So far, these have only been added to Meropis and Agartha.
• Adding towns to Meropis and Thule (only one town for Thule).

If we zoom in on Meropis, you can start to see some of the detail of the mountains and some of the cities start to become visible, but it’s still very rough. The lack of transitions between different areas also starts to become apparent at this scale. The transitions are non-existent at this point and will be a major part of our upcoming effort to smoothly transition between land and ocean or between different land terrains.

If we zoom in more on the capital city of Syros, the mountains and forests begin to come into view, and if you look carefully, you can see the Player sprite just below the city. The blockiness of the rivers and coastlines is very evident at this scale and is one of our top priorities to clean-up with special transition art for future improvements.

Zooming in a final time, the individual trees are visible along with the individual mountains. You can even see the individual houses within the capital city of Syros. At this scale, the map is starting to look very sparse. One of the primary elements that is still missing are roads which should help with the somewhat barren landscape. We’ll also be adding different colors of grassland and adding additional mountains and forests to help fill out the World of Gaia.