World Building

This is going to be a bit of a rambling post - I thought I'd talk more about the 'why' of Arnthak a bit. Not the program, but the world itself - Why Arnthak is shaped the way it is, and how it's come about/evolved. First, however, a history lesson on the game itself.

Iteration 1

Arnthak began as a significantly simpler world, and was intended to be about 4 levels of a very basic platformer:

• Cave
• Tower
• Falling sequence through some clouds
• Tower

It also looked like this:




This was about 2 weeks work, from memory, and it was hammering along. At the time (and for quite a while, actually), the Archmage was actually meant to be evil. I liked the idea of combining a platformer with the elements of Dungeon Keeper & Overlord.

Iteration 2

Reclamation ticked along, and more data was added, like the 'hill' areas and village before the caves/tower sections.


(This giant rat sprite is still in the sheet... should get Jay to update it)

(This township was meant to be 'zombified', but not necessarily by your enemy...')

At this point, there was a vague 'thought' to the world, but not really too much. The most definite features of the world were a tower that you had to get into by going through a cave...

Iteration 3

Arnthak gained a bit more focus when I realised it would be a good idea to have an interlude level, a la Duke Nukem platform games, wherein the player walked through a corridor to the next area. This corridor would contain a map that they could see their position on.

Around this time, I was doing pixel artwork during my lunch break, and spat out:

(which is a bar scene I really wanted to implement later, but don't think will ever go in well, alas).
Arnthak gained further traction, with an engine rebuild eventually, which resulted in clearer map data. With this post, a lot of the lore started to come through. I had begun keeping a journal for Arnthak and was crazily scribbling all manner of notes into it at the time. Around the time, maps were about 1200 x 600, and the background was actually 4 individual PNG files tiled across. The forest emerged, and looked like this:

(That's the slug that was recently replaced...)

Iteration 4

I began rethinking the way in which it Arnthak should play around the time when I made a throne room as a small experiment, which looked like this:

I'd implemented usable background objects, and complexity suddenly began to form... It was at this point I began to slowly scrap the existing map data and instead work on the Player's tower. I had (unfortunately) not really planned for this to happen, as this was to be for the 'sequel to Reclamation' ie: the game after the player returned to his tower. Around February, 2011, was when I started to implement and work around 'Global' play - the world map was not levels that were transitioned one-way, but instead a set of chunks stitched together. This, of course was the point at which Reclamation got shelved in favour of Arnthak (and Chris Coleman stated the now infamous 'Arnthak Forever' line).
Around this time, an experiment provided some Ice Caverns

This iteration became quite messy - the map chunks were not set sizes, and were very, very poorly laid out. I again shelved it all (again claims of 'Arnthak Forever!'), and set down a new foundation.

Iteration 5

About 2-3 months after starting Iteration 4, I wrote this post wherein I basically realised that Iteration 4 wasn't nearly well laid out enough to succeed at all. After the revamp, things burned along and the current Iteration of Arnthak is essentially this one. Note, though, the graphics are being revamped, as in April, the first chunk ever looked like this:

This area now looks like this:

The game world is now also immense, and considerably more complex. Though I'm looking forward to what I have in the works for it, it's also an effort to... stay on target.