posted 05-07-08 06:58 AM EDT (US)
Well I doubt that this gets as hilarious as Needles' making of! Loled at work, and got some strange looks from my co-workers and visitors. Oh well, it is a quiet day here so I thought I'd start explaining how the map Wizard's Folly came to being.
Usually when I start a new scenario, I start with selecting the XL map. Strange? Maybe, but I like to play huge maps so the XL option is a welcome addition.
For this map I wanted three layers which form a whole land. Thought I would be original while I haven't seen these sort of maps before. Doubting I'd be original, I await knowledge of the community about the excistence of such maps.
As said, I visualised this grand map with many forests and other scenery. As always, when I start the map I realise only then that the environment has to be created by scratch, which in this huge map, means many, many hours of scenery/landscape building. While I am at work at the moment, I don't have my notes with me, with all the hours spent on them, but will add them when I get home from work. I will make pictures of my notes so that you can see I can also understand, and write, my own version of Cantonese.
And so many hours populating the map begins. Please note, that I still haven't devised any of the wizards nor story, etc. at this point. When the map is largely finished, not detailed yet but the contours are visible, I start on planting the various wizards on their starting locations.
For this map I wanted to add the full 8 wizards. With the three layers I could spread them evenly out so that they wouldn't come into contact with each other until turn 30ish, which gave time to build up their strength. Other than Celederion, I wanted to add some immersion enhancing events. Simple things like small messages which play no active part in the game but are just there as eye- and immersion-candy. This meant a lot of scripting.
Another thing about my maps are the little scenery towns. For this map I wanted to add pop-up messages (no commercials) with a little story about the village when players entered it. Although this meant even more scripting, I am quite pleased with it if I say so myself.
While I really hate the mastery spell (and the "bug" about sphere control after conquering) I refuse to place any mana nodes. This always brings mixed reactions from the community though.
When the map was almost done, the three areas were populated, I started on the heroes. I re-used my old Library of heroes, removing the different races and adding new heroes for the new races. To justify for this blatent unoriginal behaviour (and maybe a bit laziness) I devised a background story that the map was a follow-up to Celederion.
I will continue this rather long rant later when I get home from work, and add some pictures of my Cantonese verbs.
Well due to some divine RL interference, I didn't have time to continue yesterday returning from work. I am there again. Work. Well, being AT work that is you really cannot call what I do work.
Hopefully I can post the pictures of the Cantonese verbs when I get home again (the dead batteries from my camera should be resurrected by then) as well as the time span the scenario was made in, which I noted while making it. In the meantime I will tell some more about the general planning of making my scenarios.
Like I said before, I really don't think about wizards, background, locations and eye-candy until the map is contoured. It's the same as me writing poems, I start with a first sentence and take it from there, without a plan of any kind.
So the map is contoured. After that it's deciding how many and what wizards will participate in the scenario. As said earlier, I decided on 8. 3 on the surface, 3 on the underground and 2 on the shadow world. Scribbling my Cantonese verbs, I generally outline the starting structures in the capitals. Then place them. In this scenario, I decided to add custom diplomacy messages and background. I plan to do that in future scenarios I make.
After placing all the wizards, I start populating their starting positions, again taking notes on how many ruins, etc. are near using more Cantonese verbs. I usually make one particulair starting area for the first wizard, then move on to the next one so that the map-painting doesn't get too boring too fast. It can be rather tedious to work for hours using the same scenery options. This is why I always try to "spread the climate" using steppe for one wizard, desert for another, pineforests for the third and so on. I find that this technique solves the boredom of populating large maps.
I also try to put the different races in their own environment. So the Dwarves are always surrounded by pinetrees and mountains, the Nomads in the steppe and so on. I also stay clear of unnatural mergings of scenery, like using snow next to lava.
For this scenario I tried a new technique (it helps trying out new things, while the editor is rich of all sorts of different effects) of placing the muddy changeable terrain under all the trees. This solves two things; 1. The tress don't look like they are just planted on grass and makes them more natural. 2. It helps speeding up the mappainting while you don't have to add shrubbery nor Knights who say Ni. Staying on the forest topic, a technique which I think works very well is placing the 1.4 mangrove/bushes to outline the general size and shape of the forest, and then placing all the 1.4 single trees in between (vary with type) to make the forest look more diverse and natural. Putting some leafless-trees (don't know the name in English) in between the forests makes it also more natural imho. These leafless-trees also work very well in combination with the pine-trees.
Another technique I tried out, and worked amazingly well to my own surprise, was to raise the terrain (well, that is an old technique) and then putting some cracks on the raised hills. On one side of the hills I put the changeable terrain shadow, one click only otherwise it gets too dark. Surround the hill with forests as described above and you get a nice feature imho. this is appearant in the Nomad section of the scenario.
Another solution to tedious mappainting is doing other stuff in between. After a few hours when you start to lose some interest, turn to scripting some events, making some items or making heroes. XL maps are a lot of work, and I mean a lot! Changing what you work on makes the work less boring and won't lose your interest in actually continue on working on it.
The most difficult thing about making maps in general is balancing. For this scenario, I placed a recruitment center near the capitals, again taking note of the contents. A nice fat AI block on it and defenders to strong makes that the AI won't kill the guards, leaving you with not having to fight for the new recruits. In the recruitment centers I place the, unbuildable, special 1.4 units. Then I decided that all wizards had to have wizard towers near (without the Wizards&heroes mod in play, the AI doesn't build them as known to most). This might be overkill, but although I have multiplayer in mind, I try to make sure people who play singleplayer also have sort of a challenge. With that in mind, I scripted some events boosting the AI with the recently discovered "Player-Type" condition by me (really didn't even know it excisted.).
When all the wizards positions are decided, capitols added and starting on the starting areas, I place the cities. My policy is, the more the better although I tried to take care not to overflow the map with cities, which would make it sort of unrealistic. When painting the starting area, I place the cities so that I can "paint" around them. Useful if you want to enclose a city in, for instance, mountains. Also saves work deleting parts of the mountain when you wanted to place the city afterwards. In the starting areas I also like to add the beforementioned recruitment center, surrounded by some scenery houses. New in my map was the idea of scripting pop-up events when players entered or were about to enter scenery villages. This made possible to try and make a more living world, as I try to make in all my maps (except Europe in Flames, but that's an oldie
).I also wanted to let the special tax events (as seen in the oldie map) return. Older players can recognise the reply to the "yes" option from the game Centurion, and the event itself from the Romance of the Three Kingdoms series. Problem with those events are; you have to script a lot while I find that they only work when you script them for each player seperately (maybe there is an easier way, if so, please advise). That means with 8 wizards, you'd have to script 48 events ("Show Message", "Reply Yes", "Reply No", "Show Message Reply Yes", "Show message Reply No" and "Income after Reply yes" times 8) for one event to trigger. Like I said, if anyone knows a better way, please advise.
Another event I wanted to implement are the limits on mana stack. While I think spells are part of Age of Wonders, I dislike the fact that players can have stacks and stacks of mana, using it to enchant all their troops, buy items from the AI and so on. That is also why I decided on the refusal of placing mana nodes (also due to the mastery spell) in this scenario as well as Celederion. Again, this event was scripted for each player seperately and was rewritten and debugged many times for it to work.
Many of the events were inspired by some advice I got from my good friend, and LAN buddy, The Geez.
Okay, time for some more work (although it is very quiet here, I have to do some work).
As you can see, I can understand and read my own Cantonese. These are just a small portion of the notes taken during the making of the scenario. Posting more would glog up this thread.
As you can see, I drew a map with the old setup. After I was finished populating the map, adding the events and teleporters, I came to the conclusion during playtesting that the Underground level actually was in the middle when you play the game. Ofcourse, I had to remedy it while it would be so much better if you actually went to the side of the other part when changing maps. So that if you went from the underground to the surface map, you actually move to the left and vice-versa. Am I still making sense? Hope so, while I seem to have lost myself four lines ago.
So far the Cantonese stuff.
Hours spent on the map: 72 hours scattered from the 4th of April to the 19th of April.
Hours spent on the events: 13 hours, same time span.
Hours spent on the items: 4 hours (again used Celederion items, and added new ones), same time span.
Hours spent on the Heroes/Wizards: 5 hours, same time span.
Hours spent on playtesting and bug-removal: 8 hours.
Further playtesting was done by The Geez which will not be counted in this.
So this kind of map takes about 94 hours, spread out over 16 days. Please note that I was recovering from illness and had a lot of spare time.
This should be the whole land. Sorry for the white lines
Well I guess that concludes the Making of...
Any questions regarding picking my brain, suggestions for my next scenario, etc. feel free to post here.
Kind regards,
Low
[This message has been edited by Low_K (edited 05-08-2008 @ 09:16 AM).]
). 
I really wouldn't know what might cause the bug. I played the scenario, with 2 human players, for many turns and it never crashed. 
