Merry christmas everyone!
This time I'll go a little more in depth of the though process of my map building and game progression.
I always loved semi-open world games i.e. older Zelda games, Metroid and my favorite map of them all gotta be Dark Souls 1. So naturally I get a lot of inspiration from those.
My world is seemlessly interconnected and you are free to go whatever direction you want from the get go.
One thing I especially loved about the Dark Souls map is the verticallity, not so much great plains you have to ride across but more going up or down, so that's something I'll try to achieve as well (And my original painting was already more vertical than horizontral).
In Zelda/Metroid, progressing certain paths is gate-keeped by you requiring a certain item (Strenght gauntlets, missiles etc.).
Dark Souls sometimes does a thing which I love which is gate-keeping just by difficulty, you could potentially progress this path but it just seems too hard atm, but with skill it's totally doable.
So my goal in is to do the gate-keeping with knowledge. The most obvious example of this is a code.
The game is based on loops so lets say you follow a certain quest to completion during one loop, the reward is a code to a door.
Next loop the code to the door is saved in your logbook. So all subsequent playthroughs this door will be accessible right from the start.
So this is where I try to be creative and come up with different ways knowledge can gate-keep.
Certain doors might be open during a specific time frames.
Characters will be able to branch their behaviours if certain conditions are met before.
A colored plank in the floor is a pressure plate that activates only if you stand on it for x amount of seconds.
And so on...
Here is a screenshot collage from Unity editor of my complete world, very few or no more rooms will be added.
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