Making your own worlds

Published on May 22, 2009 By Frogboy In Elemental Dev Journals

I’m a map junkie. I love making maps. I even bought a program called Campaign Cartographer years ago just to make maps.

One of the features of Elemental is, not surprisingly, a map editor. But the map editor is also being designed so that you can export your creations so you can easily print them out and such.

The map editor will let users build theri own mountain ranges, forests, swamps, you name it.

Of course, it’s also useful that you will be able to then play on these maps with your friends and share them online but just the ability to make your own worlds sounds fun to me anyway.

Comments (Page 4)

Fetus4188

on May 27, 2009

Enabling custom map scripts such as those CIV has would allow the community to do this sort of thing and more.

Pnakotus

on Jun 14, 2009

The fourth idea is terrible. More iron = makes iron things faster roffle. That's Starcraft-level simplification.

While it's true that complexity turns away players, let's all be honest for a moment - people who don't want a certain level of complexity will not EVER buy this game. Remember in the early 21st century when RTS games turned their back on ever-growing resource lists to go back to the standard 2 or 3? The people who drove that aren't going to buy a fantasy-themed strategy game with management, no matter how much auto-fighting, governor AI or simplification you put in and chasing that market will only hurt the game by placing it in a middle, nowhere place.

If economic complexity can be added back in with mods, who cares (I'll just never ever play vanilla, like Stardock's other games) but sacrificing the opportunity to make something interesting for 'lol iron = +10% build speed' isn't going to broaden the audience to the degree some might expect. That said, as much as I'd like the original approach, without a great UI it'd be horrible crap, so the third idea is probably best (ie, economy with resource movement rather than massive oversimplifications but not requiring ludicrous juggling).

EDIT - Ok... so the link for the resourcing system lead to the map designer thread. Hooray?

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