So I’ve finally a working prototype of map. I’m proud of it, it has zoom in/out, pathfinding (with unpassable walls and doors), and fog of war (so as you discover it, some zones clear out). But – I have some serious bugs 😀

First performance problem – had to use batch to blit all the various tiles, since there are 4 layers… background, terrain, moveable objects (party and monsters) and fog all over it. Now with batch, I have some problems with zooming since I can’t now just use one single function to zoom in/out… 😐

Well I guess that was too good to be true to have such a system ready in only 2 days of part-time work. I’ll have to spend more time on it. Anyway, I’m also wondering if is better to have big maps with realtime movement , or smaller ones with turn based movement.

The pathfinding algorithm works fine – so that’s not a problem. It is mostly about playability, not sure if exploration should be such an important part of my game, or just focus on combat (after all, in Magic Stones you go straight to the battles and people seems really to love it…!). With realtime, to make a level last some minutes, I would have to make a bigger map. With turn-based, would be more a matter of avoiding monsters or even using sneak attacks, and so on. Actually I was even wondering if to discard the first person view and use only the topdown even for the combat…
I’ll have to think carefully about this aspect since it would influence all the game.