Making the first Halberd game: There's no math in this blog post, I promise!

In the last two posts I did a ton of math, all to make a squiggly line. That's peak efficiency right there, nowhere to go but down!

Anyhow, today will be a little more hands-on than that. To that end, I've produced a gorgeous tileset:

Being serious for a moment, this tileset should cover all of my basic needs for laying out a path. It has 3 colors, representing floor, stairs, and wall. For a  little winding path in the foothills of a mountain, that should be all I need to start with. Next up is the map itself:

This is the first time I've really been able to appreciate the scale of what I'm building. It's big, bigger than I'd really pictured in my head! And of course, I'll be building several areas of similar scale. It shouldn't be a problem, but man. That's a lot of map.

Well there's no time to spend crying over map dimensions, so let's dig in. First of all, I can cut out the margins...

...3 minutes in, I feel the sweet embrace of Carpal Tunnel Syndrome approach and hastily add a 'paintbucket' tool. Some limitations are just too harsh.

With that roadblock out of the way, putting together a path that mostly matches the calculations from earlier is child's play:

...it's not the most awesome map I've ever seen, but it'll serve as a good template to work with. Next, I abuse the properties of Manhattan Distance to make the path much more interesting with little change to its actual length:

After measuring, this path is pretty close to my 250 tile goal. Finally, I widen it out a little bit:

I can fix any errors and smooth things out as I go, so this feels like a pretty good base to work with. Next up, we need some art!

Art, and problems

Over the weekend, I assembled the start of a tileset for this mountain path:

One thing probably stands out here--There's a lot of brick, but not much natural stone or dirt. I tried a few rockier walls at first, but I had trouble getting them to look good with the rest of the tiles. In the end, I decided to go with retaining walls, as you might see in a couple spots on a well-maintained trail. I'll probably keep looking for a good rough stone wall for some of the higher parts of the trial, though.

Once that was done, I put the new tiles into the map and came to a terrible realization:

The walls have inconsistent heights, royally screwing up the perspective. It's blindingly obvious in retrospect, of course the edges of the terrain need to line up!

Unfortunately, this means that I have some fixing to do.....