Dnd Map V2

 

It would be an understatement to say that this went significantly better than the first playthrough. Like last time, Tommy L. and Anthoney J. were the playtesters for my map. I was so happy to hear their astonished voices the second the map loaded in. To me, this was the greatest sign that it had some major improvements.

Most noticeably, All enemies and players have been scaled up by at least an additional tile. By making the players larger, it made it easier to make the map smaller, and thus the scope of the project much more manageable. Another thing I did was greatly reduce the amount of enemies, to around a ⅓ of that of the original map. I also greatly nerfed and balanced their stats, as the original enemies I made were way too op compared to the stats of the players. Going along with that, I actually nerfed multiple enemies during the live playthrough, carefully listening to what the playtesters had to say. Finally, I added doors to the map, this made it significantly easier to uncover and lighten specific rooms at a time.

I also added a theme to the map. While the first one had a weak forest color palette, this map has a much more clear ocean theme. Another thing I did to enforce that was give all the enemies textures that resembled sea creatures, colors that those creatures would have had, and custom names that also match the setting. Enemies who didn’t have a strong oceanic like texture, like the dragon for example, I simply retinted blue, and renamed it “Hydra”. Using the doors, I was able to constrain the map to only having 6 individual rooms. This made it so I could more easily use Fog of War. As anytime a player unlocked a door, I simply lit up the room it led to.

To give further detail to the map, I was able to retain the idea of planting grass (now seaweed) and rocks along the background to try to fill in the blandness. Now that I was more experienced with how Roll20 worked, I was able to save these objects, and not have them corrupt like in my original attempt. Despite this map being significantly higher quality than the first, because of my newly learned skills and criticisms, this one was actually completed faster than the original.

For comparison, here's the first iteration:

As you can see, there simply isn't much to see. The entire map design was almost built like a maze, with me simply scattering enemies wherever there was room. Not only was it impossible to to beat simply due to the enemies stats, but the level itself would have been very boring. I attribute pretty much all the flaws of this map to me never having played DnD before. After a few games with my fellow classmates, I then understood how the map designs should have been fleshed out.

By comparing the two pictures, you can see that the 2nd iteration shares practically no similarities. But like I mentioned before, some of my most favorite things did make it over, such as grass and rocks. Another thing that I not only did again, but improved upon, was the naming and visible stats of the enemies. Giving all players and enemies stat bars above their head greatly increased the playability of the game, with players able to add their own health to their characters (such as a mage doing a heal spell) or removing health from enemies when attacked. Doing this also built a framework which could easily be added on if the project guidelines would allow. I was considering things like potions, to give things like stat boosts. Normally this would be difficult to keep track of, but since all player and enemy stats are now visible, it should be a breeze to work with if ever added.