Playing with Tiles

Each area of the module is created using “tilesets”, which it is a group of “tiles” based on a theme (Forest, Desert, Caverns, Rural, City, Interior, …) that can be placed and rotated within a rectangular grid, to create a very good facsimile of almost anything the builder would need.  The NWN toolset provides a very good variety of tilesets to choose from; and several very talented folks have even created more that may be freely downloaded and used in your module as “.haks”.  For this particular module, I am only interested in working with the basic tiles and those added by Project Q.

One of the keys to keeping a module ‘interesting’ is to use different tilesets to prevent all the areas from all looking alike.  For the purpose of Adventure, really, only two tilesets would be required: a Forest for the outdoor areas, and the Caverns for the interior; but that would get boring rather quickly as each area would start to look like the one before.  So, I introduced a few other tilesets where I could to provide visual interest as well as better approximate some of the features of the original text game.

As I had mentioned earlier, the Forest areas were made using the Castle Exterior, Rural tile sets.  I wanted all the forest areas to look similar, as real forests tend to do (that is why they are so easy to get lost in); but for the area where the stream disappears into the slit in the rocks, I wanted to place it into a more canyon-like setting, limiting the player’s choices of direction to either downstream (south) or upstream (north)

[Yes, I know the text game allows east/west movement from this area – but as I mentioned, it was beginning to get easier to make slight deviations from the original at this point.  As the NWN game requires one to actually ‘move’ their toon from one place to the next rather than simply typing “e” and jumping to the next area east; I felt the four forested areas to the north that allowed e/w movement was enough.]

So, I chose the original Bioware ‘Rural’ tileset for this area as it has cliffs that could easily provide the canyon effect I wanted.  Now a bit of head scratching … how to make the stream disappear into a slit in the rocks – no tile provides for that.

My first attempt was to simply end the stream and place a lot of boulders about to hide the banks and then spread about some gravel to continue the dry streambed to the south.  The effect was ‘ok’; but several things bothered me: 1) the gravel was the same elevation as the ground, so it looked more like a path than a streambed – only the fact that it continued from the end of the stream allowed one’s imagination to think of it as a streambed; and 2) all the gravel required a lot of overlapping placeables – and that often results in a bit of a shimmering effect as one moves about the area.  But, it was good enough, until … I discovered the placeable tile floors in the ‘Project Q’ stuff.  One of the floors looked like loose stone (as opposed to square tiles) and by continuing the stream south to the edge of the map, I was able to place the ‘floor’ at the same level as the water and viola, a dry streambed!  A few boulders to hide the ‘joint’ and a nice group of flat rocks to provide the slit under the water where it ended and I felt I had created a very good representation of what the text described – was very pleased with it actually.

For the next area, rather than employ the same trick again (it had two very minor shortcomings: 1) the splashes still occurred when the player walked along the streambed; and 2) the players feet were located on the bottom of the streambed, so were under the rock floor), I opted to use the Desert tileset, which provides for a dry streambed.  This turned out even more advantageous as the end of the streambed is a small depression – just what is needed to match the description in the text game.  The only real problem with the desert tileset is the almost complete lack of vegetation – I did add quite a bit of greenery, but would really have liked a “grass” floor to cover most of the sand above the streambed.

For the caverns, the natural choice of a tileset is Mines and Caverns, but for variety I have also included the Underdark (very useful for the canyons as well as the larger areas especially when a chasm is required …) and again the Desert set for the Bird Chamber, which according the text has walls of flowing orange stone – a pretty good match I’m thinking.  I also repeated my tile floor trick to create the cobbles for the Cobble Crawl area – pretty amazing how different the tileset looks with a different floor texture.

Thus far, I have been rather pleased with the results – I feel as though the toolset has allowed for a pretty good representation of the areas .  There are a few other “underground” tilesets that will likely find some use in the mod as I continue building.