A sort of help.

[Link7037]

I'm using the 1.92 beta 183 ver. of zquest, and i'm having a hard time making an overworld for my quest. Any sort of would work: Advice, a basic layout, or even a full-blown overworld.
Anything that helps would be great.

[Espo]

you can spend a long time planning an overworld and never make any progress on it. on the other hand you can not plan at all and it will come out pretty poorly unless your lucky. your best bet is somewhere in the middle. one thing to realize is that with these later versions of ZQ you can easily have more than one overworld. so you need to decide how many you want first. so assuming you want 1 then one route would be to plan what kind of areas you want for your overwold and where you want them. one thing i do sometimes is this. you know how to change the pallette your viewing the screen as in zq? by pressing a number key 0-9 or shift0-shift5. this is only useful for editing and doesn't effect your quest but what it does offer you is that you can change the color of the screen blocks in your map in the bottom left of the zq screen. so you can just set up blank screens and change these block colors so you can sort of lay out different areas of your map before you actually build them. this is only a suggestion. there's no real right way to deisgn and overworld. you may also want to consider where you will place teh levels or which sort of path you want the player to take. somethings can be artbitrary and random (try to make forests and coast lines and stuff random... it tends to look more natural). I could go on for hours. I've seen posts like this one before. maybe we should try to compile everyones creative suggestions into a sort of overworld building faq of sorts???

[Link7037]

Thanks for the help.
I'll try what you say.

[Alexfrog]

Not sure what area your problem lies, I'll try to respond to both:


Regarding the details of zquest, set DMap 0 to be type overworld, and set the value in continue to the coordinates of the screen to start on. Set color to 0 (overworld). Otherwise you'll probably get strange color options.

use + and - to switch color sets to find stuff you want.
use arrow keys to move around the overworld map.

On the right side of the area near the bottom of the screen that has the start point, continue point, item location etc, there are two rectangles. The top one moves you up in the tileset and the bottom one moves you down. Use this to find the tiles you are looking for, as in anything but the basic graphics you wont see all the needed tiles there.

Thats a bunch of stuff I had to figure out when I started.



Regarding design:

Plan out the overworld in terms of general terrain areas, like a forest area, hills area, coast area, graveyard, etc. These areas shouldnt be too small, but obviously arent going to take up a while overworld map.

In each area place some secrets. A couple trees to burn and places to bomb, and whatever else. Have a purpose for each area. Like the forest hides level 2 and a critical item, while in the mountanous region there is another level and a place to buy more bombs, or whatever. Have some informational locations around as well. Have graphical hints occasionally, like the arrows of blocks from zelda, but less obvious, pointing at secrets.
Dont make all the screens similar, in fact make them each different, and many of them have their cool unique feature, some landmark or peculiar formation of terrain. Have the colors shift to designate borders between areas, and the monsters shift too.

Have the mosters in the area give the feel of the difficulty of the area you are trying to convey. If its the area level 1 is in, dont make them too hard, if level 4 is around there, the enemies in the area shouldnt be wimps.

Have general areas of map where there is a grouping of screens with a large number of entranceways amongst the screens within that area. But the number of openings that transition between these general map areas are few.

For example, in an area of forest that is roughly 4 by 5 screens large, most of the possible paths from one screen to another withing that 4x5 are available, and maybe there are a couple important blockages that make a corner of if harder to access and thus seem different, and ripe for some important secret. But then, the number of ways into an out of this 4x forest area into other map areas are few, only like 3 different ways in an out to other big areas.


Just start making the map, and creating screens for an area, and go with what comes to you. Then go through and try and spice up the less interesting screens with something noticable.

The areas very near important things liek a critical item or a level entrance should be more unique. This stimulates the player to explore those areas in more detail. The areas that are just general travelling areas should have less features. Here the secrets are a burnable bush here and a bombable wall there and a shop somewhere else. Nothing that the player will get stuck if they dont find. These general travelling areas are important to make the critical areas stand out. If every screen has some critical secret and everything is tightly packed together, it wont work as well.

[Alexfrog]

Also, as mentioned before, randomness is good. You dont have to plan out everything. Just let the location of the coastline or how the edge of trees looks fall randomly as you click stuff onto the screen.

When you do this, and then put your secrets in areas that look a bit more planned, it makes them stand out!

Alternately, have the secret in a place thats really random, when other stuff looks planned. :)
(But if you do this, you might want to put a hint in somewhere to help out if its critical).

Remember to make sure that your screen borders line up. You dont want people walking from clear terrain in one screen into a tree in another. Wherever a barrier is on the edge in one screen, a barrier must be on the corresponding edge of its neighbor. When I create a screen, I first place the barrier of the area (trees, cliff walls, whatever), on the edges corresponding to where a barrier was on teh adjacent screen, and then go from there...