Monday, June 30, 2008

Dungeon Tiles

I wanted to do something on here that wasn't me just bleating on
about finished work that I've noticed has been published. A while back I did some maps for D&D 4e, which I believe (sometimes these things change) will show up in Pyramid of Shadows. I had a brilliant time with them and while doing them I had a lot of flash backs to old dungeon tile packs I bought as a kid, and I had the germ of an idea to do some simple ones for people to download and use for their games, on t'internet like. So that's what I'll be starting here, it's a simple game component but it will also let me talk a bit about the design process, which is always fun to do.
So lets start with a brief (this, I know is going to come back to haunt me, over and over again).

Dungeon tiles -I wont explain this bit, if your bothering to read this you know what they are, what they're going to be used for and who's going to use them. I will set it that they'll be on a grid of 1" squares and lets also say here that the first ones will be corridor pieces and we want enough to be able to build a pretty comprehensive maze type setting, lets sayyyyy 12 pieces.

Style -Style or 'form', I believe follows function, so apart from the obvious (they're depicting a dungeon for use with miniatures in an rpg) what other things do i have to take into consideration. Well, I want them to be easy to download and print out. More importantly I also want them to be easy for me to do, I don't want to have to spend days on these at a time. So I'm going to set the restriction that they have to be B/W line (I could probably get away with grey scale, but I fancy making things even tighter for myself design wise). This will make the file size smaller, the scale of the work more manageable, and the finishes easy for people to printout (you wont need a colour printer). I also want them to have a desert feel to them, and I want them to be from an abandoned city.

That's a good enough start I reckon.