Irregardless of other features, I’m quite confident that there will be mine-able stones in the game. In the older days they were made as a special terrain type, but that approach had many pros. So how can they be made in a new game?
Looking at many other games – stones are often found as clumps of objects placed on terrain. So that they can be mined and terrain below them is gradually revealed. So let’s mix that with our malleable terrain!
Having 3D tiles and overlays mechanism this can be done as “Objects” that are overlayed on top of the tiles and deform with them, where each object represents a certain stone supply (e.g. 1 to 5). Each time a stonecutter mines one stone (from any direction!) the object changes to a less dense, until finally it just vanishes leaving just “gravel”. To improve the looks of it we can add additional stone chunks spread around.
While writing this post I have already mocked up how it can look in the NextGame:
Of course there should be several variations of stone objects, so that they don’t look so cloned, but that is a matter of time – hopefully that can be done later.
P.S. Comments are welcome 😉
Hmm I’m not sure how this works. If they are objects, there is no way to edit stone mountains in a map editor, right? But you wrote they ‘deform’ with the tiles. For me it’s hard to imagine how that works. Could you clarify? 🙂
Request for next post – taken! 🙂