A) Walkable and unwalkable for doors you can go through and doors you can't etc,.
B) Safe grass and dangerous grass with different monsters.
C) If you tile an area with a checker board of half safe tiles and half monster infested ones the chance of meeting a monster on that area is halved.
D) Invisible barriers. (I used this in Time Fracture to produce an invisible maze for the endgame.)
A) Decide how you will use the main map.
B) Start with the area where the game begins then add all the submaps & rooms you need for that area then work through the game.
C) Bear in mind that it isn't too much of a problem to add a room or two later if you need to but deleting rooms or submaps unless they are the last of their kind and have nothing in them is fraught with difficulty.
D) You can change the location of a room or submap if you could use it elsewhere rather than deleting it.
E) If you delete a room or submap the situation is recoverable but you may have to reassign the location of every other room, submap, warp point, map change, special monster, store and guild in the game. You will certainly need to check if they are still correct. This would be easier if you had made a list of each of these but it's better if you just don't delete anything.
F) When the map is finished add any warp points (and change walkable tiles to unwalkable if necessary) so you can walk the whole map. This means you can see what it looks like from inside of the game. Check if anything looks wrong. Check you can get everywhere.
A) Check that all stores and guilds appear where they should and contain the right items.
A) If the game is fairly linear you can do this in stages and check each stage as you go.
B) The special monsters will need nominal stats at this stage.
Flags work like this. If you define an event/talking event on a particular square then everytime you visit that square the event is triggered. Of course sometimes you don't want an event to trigger until something else has happened. In that case you set one of the flags in the "Required" flags section of the event defining screen. (You can give this flag an appropriate name in the "Flags" part of the Editor.) Then all you need to do is to make sure that when you define the event that has to happen first, you set the same flag in the "Grant" flags part of the event defining screen.
You can also make an event "Clear" a flag. You can clear a flag even if the player doesn't actually have it without ill effect, this allows you to do some clever things. In my demo I use this to give appropriate messages when crossing to and fro over a bridge.
Some people prefer to set a lot of flags right at the beginning of the game. They then use this so that they can have, for instance, several people who will tell you the same piece of information. These events all need one of the flags that have been set. The events that are your conversation with each of these people then clear that flag so that once one of the people has told you the information the other people don't.
Think of it this way. If an event grants you a flag then you can add it to your notional flag inventory. When you get to a square where there is an event that needs a flag if that flag is in your inventory then the event will trigger. If you haven't got the flag it won't.
A further thing to notice is that if an event gives one or more flags then the event will not trigger again so long as you have all those flags. However if only one of those flags is cleared by a later event then the original event will reactivate.
A) Higher number flags do not override lower numbered ones but higher numbered events do take priority over lower numbered ones (also see below). This means that flags can occur in any order.
B) However, if you like to have your flags in some sort of logical play order, when testing the game you may discover that you need to add another flag or more in the middle of the sequence so leave gaps. I use only the odd numbers but even then I sometimes need to move some. (Obviously this is proportional to how many flags you think you will use in total.)
A) At this point you need to decide on a first approximation to the right stats for all the monsters including special ones.
A) I play tested my game in stages and decided how many levels I wanted players to increase with each stage if they played straight through without making special efforts to build up their stats and kept replaying till all worked to my satisfaction.
Last updated 8th October 2000