Creation of Worlds
“The earth was without form and void”
As you may have seen, We’ve already been writing about FEUDUMS’ maps; how they look, some features the players have to deal with and the technical considerations during implementation. Derek has also introduced the map editor that the players can use to build up their own customised world. Creating a map for a strategy game is still a big challenge and we thought we’d give you the first opportunity to influence FEUDUMS with some ideas of your own.
World Creation for Dummies
The ratio and distribution of the water and the land tiles determines the available space of the players and how they can get around. On one end of the scale is the inland maps where we can find no big connected water tiles, there is no sea, just small lakes and rivers. On the other end is when just small islands are on the map that gives a relatively narrow space to extend the border of a feudum. If we gather these small islands to the middle of the map we get the pangea map that has only one big supercontinent in the surrounding ocean. Rivers can also shape the landmasses.
FEUDUMS offers traversable maps, where there is no border around the map but the players can walk around. On the other hand, a map can be also bordered and in that case further map types can be built. An inland map with a wide flow in the middle that separates the two banks, for example.
Another consideration is the used tile elements. FEUDUMS offers a variety of terrain types, amongst them are wetlands, forests, hills, mountains, plains or grasslands, with a couple others. Building a huge, vast forest that reaches both ends of the map is an option, but this gives just one type of ground that would not be optimal for building a flourishing feudum. A typical feudum is somewhere between 3-8 tiles, and in this size 2-3 terrain types should be available at least for the best chance to survive. But laying a sequence from every available ground type one by one results a variegated but not very nice map where the big mountains and lakes are completely missing.
Finding a good balance of everything is hard, but sometimes we can put it aside this criteria. Building a custom map that implements a real geographical area is another option. Europe or the USA also can appear on the map and fictional worlds, like Westeros of the Game of Thrones also can be built and playable.
It's not a God Game, but...
We were thinking that this can be the first chance for fans to have real input into the implementation of the game. Maybe you have a different map type in your mind and you want to see it in the game. The idea is that we would open up the FEUDUMS map editor for the community (with a partially working player registration to store the unique maps on the server) and give it to you. You can see the game engine working by creating your own maps and we can see what maps are in your mind. The best maps can be rewarded; we could put up the name of the creator to the staff list or offer in-game rewards.
What do you think? Community lies at the heart of FEUDUMS; so why not build this world together?
Why not an historical map ? Its so rare those day, would be great to play in a medieval europe shattered in thousands of Feudums ! :D
A stellar idea ;) We've thought about historical maps before, and we're toying with the idea of including features to add political entities to the maps (although this would probably be for private gaming only). Thanks StellarAngel, we'll definitely explore this idea further :)