One Big Castle

Hello, it's been a bit. I think I'm gonna pop out an update soon. This part of the year is busy for my like real job so it'll be a bit more of a drip feed thru the summer. So, what do you work on, slowly, in drip drops, over months?

A giant goddamn demon castle, of course.

Avid players of Asqueria may recall Lapys Palace - A tantalizing forested castle above Lapysbrook that was inaccessible, blocked off by a Placeholder NPC. Well, here's what he was hiding (attached file/pic). 

I learned a lot focusing on one "location" for so long. Although it got a bit big. This bad boy takes up 4 map IDs - 2x 50x50s, and 2x 100x100s. I tried to use the colored arrows to show what rooms connect to what, IDK if it totally makes sense but whatever, it works in game (I think). The names are generic to spoiler proof, lets call them Basement 1 and Basement 2 though.

Palace / Upstairs - Tried to channel inspiration from basically every classic FF castle ever. We got imperial music, rooms full of NPCs gossiping and pointing you towards treasure or ways to kill monsters, A suspicious ruler and a lot of guards. This map was an experiment to see how much I could make it feel like you were going "up floors" while actually staying on the same map. It's a pretty basic tileset but the juice is in the NPCs, all custom made and full of useful tidbits. And infernal bloodwine. So very full of wine.

Basement 1- Well I won't spoil much since we've got the whole layout here but this ended up pretty big. The learning here was how to fill up a big empty space with a lot of rooms. This one has a lot of "Environmental storytelling". The rooms have purpose, and are in different states of use or disrepair. There's the story of what's literally happening with the main characters, but also, stories about what's happened here before, over many years. There's only one save point on this map but it's right in the middle of the place, hopefully it feels accessible.

Basement 2- The concept here was to do "the big tease". You get a peak at this level on the way to B1, and then you get to do a tantalizing dance around that the middle platform, dreading what's to come. This map changed a lot since this screenshot but the general layout remains similar. My big worry about this one is it might feel a bit too long, so I ended up adding not one but two extra save points along the way, just on this map.  I can see why a lot of games move to "save anywhere" or "autosave" but I'm still kinda set on save points.  I do have a way to use them anyways, if I change my mind- but that's a topic for another post.

Pros and cons of spending so much time on one location?

Pros-

•  I feel like my "large scale" layout skills and "small scale" decorate skills improved. I did edit and touch up some tilesets to suit my needs here. 
• My enemy design also levelled up I feel like. They're not too complicated, but I've got some "template" enemy behaviours now that I've been able to tweak and re-use a few times and I feel like it makes the combat design easy while providing challenge and variety.  
• Loot- At least for me my ideas for armor/weapons/etc and the loot system feel good. 
• Quality of Life on random encounter areas - I applied the "grace zone" logic I used on the overworld to this dungeon. The random encounters are mostly on the main path - Mostly NOT in side rooms. It's a bit subtle but, when you're in a room meant to just check things out, read stuff get loot etc, you don't get your flow interrupted by random battles. Good lesson I learned here, I think.
• At this point, I have some many monster models that sometimes I have to CHOOSE to re-use and recolor one, Just to keep things familiar and signal certain strengths/weaknesses -- But that's cool, that I have established archetypes that players "should" start to understand and go "Oh, it's a different one of those"
• I like making monsters, it seems. This area brings like 20 new enemies, and 8 new Infernal World NPCs that can also be used as Side Battlers. So at least the wait was worth it, I hope! 

Cons-

• I did not level up my coding/eventing/scripting skills here. I used what I had- Not really got the time/brain power atm to do big system stuff, but luckily I don't have many things like that left.  Quest Journal/Menu/something is a big one but that's a topic for another post.
• It became clear early on I couldn't just have the same handful of generic imp/demons be all the town NPCs, and so I've created a couple dozen "player-style" npcs with the character generator to use. It's fun but it does take time/brain power.
• The way i've been doing the game (In game lore books, everything with flavour text, wordy NPCs) makes a place like this really taxing. it's a LOT of text to write. I had to leave some stuff placeholder for now, all of it will require a 2nd pass for completeness sake. Clearly I wrote too much here. But a bigger question is - Can I just split up things I write into smaller, more digestible pieces? 
• It might be too big? I had to add a lot of save points which makes me wonder about my commitment to having the game work that way to begin with, but we'll see how it goes.
• It's a pretty hefty chunk of content but in the end, it really is just one point of interest filled out on the map.  It's hard to justify putting so much into one spot when there's like a hundred other spots to do.  
• This patch lets you get a new party member and then runs out of content to play them in, but hey, that's a later problem. 

Of course, I'll learn more when people actually play (and break) this crazy place. Gimme a couple days to play it a bit myself and we'll see.

See you in Asqueria, fam. Hopefully soon.