The iPhone Project

[Gan]

Eq's right.

Also there'll need to be a new map for each growth of the town.

If you guys want to make maps easily, check out Tiled:
http://www.mapeditor.org/

That's what I use.

[Charlo]

It would be cool if the town started off with a fixed map but then grew randomly with streets/houses in an organic fashion.  

[Gan]

Over time?

That'd take quite a bit of code to make it grow randomly with structure organization. Stone paths would have to be coded to go from building to building. Certain stores would need to grow only if needed. Having 2 magic shops right next to each other would be pointless. Spacing between objects and stores would have to be measured. The people of the town would need tasks that they do. Paths that they wander. Text that they say.
Sprites would have to be made for the different buildings and their ground work. There would have to be the dirt, frame, partially built, than fully built phase of each building.

A simple way I would think is:
In Tiled build a basic map with a few buildings. Add a Layer, add more buildings. Add another layer, add even more buildings, and so fourth until your town is complete. Then export each part of the build process. Then in your game have the player do a quest, after completion change the map to the map with more town built.

[Connors]

Yeah that was the idea! The map changes in a preset way as the storyline progresses. As for graphics I could try my hand at terrain again but I've found I do well with items. I dunno, I thought 44x44 worked ok for maps. Should inventory be different?

[EqwanoX]

i was thinking have one town map that becomes more populated by people as the game progresses, new shopkeepers would set up shop with better items and things like that. the people dont have to move around either

[Connors]

OMG I played Adventure (from the Atari) it was fun!

[GMG Kurt]

A good idea would be the merchants oath. Something in 'The Legend of Zelda and the Wind Waker' Where if you gave a merchant a flower he would give you back a different one, and keep sending them to the store you represented, and that store would send that one type of product to the other. You could use this to grow you mercantile business dependent on the player's trading abilities.

[Gan]

That may be a good idea. But unfortunately this is a zombie thread. It's been dead for a while.

[GMG Kurt]

oh sorry I didn't check the dates

[Connors]

Zombie thread is right. Stupid freaking iRPG.
Nobody really told me what happened to this, not even Gan.
Gan, you were working on a tile map program for a while there, did it get deleted or something?
And I've got a whole database of sprites you guys made, in case anyone wants them back, for some reason. They're pretty good.

[Gan]

I've still got it. It's a map editor I built to... make maps.

Warhampster's tiles were really good. Silver's sprites are good as well. You know, maybe one day this zombie will come back to life.
Just not today.

[Gan]

Sorry to be dredging up an old thread but I just happened to stumble upon the source and man...

the iRPG looks good. The menus and graphics are beautiful. It's quite unfortunate this died from lack of direction.

Oh man... the guilt is hitting. Ah it hurts...
And now I'm remembering all the other things I've started and never finished. This is sad. I'm tired of not finishing.

[Connors]

Hey, didn't this thing hit a dead end because you thought you has lost the source code? I think I remember something about Gan's computer crashing...

And you're right. It's a shame to not use any of this stuff.

PS: If we still don't wind up picking up the project again maybe open-source it all for the rest of us?

[Gan]

Crazy, I thought I did open source it a while ago.

And I do vaguely remember something about dead computers.

[GMG Kurt]

Exactly what is it? is it a grid nav system, or a full-fledged rpg engine? I regrettably didn't read this part of the fourm