Good Monday everyone! My plan to write this on the plane over to Boston was foiled by not having enough room to type properly… But I’ve been writing this in my head since Friday so I just needed to find time to type this out, put those pitchforks down and take a pew.

We pushed on with something that has been bothering me for a while this week, the map layout.

Mapping out

The map redo started last Thursday when myself and Sax started talking about ground textures. Which whilst Sax wanted to start, he couldn’t touch it if the current layout was going to change. So we did the next logical step and I went through and recreated the map entirely in Solidworks and upgraded it. This allowed me to make sure that every lane, jungle camp, tower, and base were fully dimensioned and precise. Here are some shots before and after the update.

It took a good few nights to get the map in a fashion that we want. This will be the layout that our first alpha release will have albeit with some possible minor changes if anything crops up in our testing.

Note that this version of the map currently doesn’t have any brush in it.

Our map takes inspiration from Dawngate’s map. We wanted to take the concept of the map and put more emphasis on early aggression and small skirmishes. The most obvious change is that we have shifted the placement of our wells, placing 2 in the central jungle section, and the remaining 2 in the center of the map.

In case you didn’t get the chance to play Dawngate, the Spirit Wells were objectives controlled either team. Whilst under a teams control, they would spawn worker minions that increased the passive gold gain of the team that controlled it. These workers could be killed to reduce the passive gold gain of the controlling team. Each team started the game by controlling the two wells closest to their base, but they could be captured by the enemy team after a duration.

By placing the wells closer to the center of the map we hope to encourage the respective lanes to aggress on them sooner in matches.

We have located the secondary wells in a much more defendable location, which is easier to defend than the wells in Dawngate, where they were both lost at similar times in most matches. This should put more emphasis on individual wells during the early game, while also making it so that you don’t loose all your well income at once.

Due to the lack of wells in the corners of the map, we are able to streamline our jungle. As the side jungle sections are not normally going to be a location that team fights take place in, we are able to set up winding corridors that allow a player that takes the time to plan in advance to get an advantage when they engage with the enemy.

The central jungle section is notably more open than Dawngate’s, due to our major objective being placed there.

We have gone for a 4-4-4 camp placement, to allow us maximum flexibility in later stages of testing.

Our camp placements are intended to allow for players to choose between partial or full clear of the jungle. By creating this dichotomy, we hope to encourage both power farming junglers and lane gankers in the jungle.

An area where we have differed from traditional MOBA’s is that we are including a wall type that we refer to as chasms.

Chasms do not block vision, but do block movement they allow dashes to pass over them. By adding this kind of wall, we’re looking to open up additional play patterns. Particularly around our wells and our equivalent to Parasite. This will allow players to strategically prepare for upcoming fights that they may not have otherwise been able to prepare for, on both sides.

Finally, our base is quite similar to Dawngate’s. We have a central being that takes on the same role as Dawngate’s Guardian, acting as a raid boss-like final fight. In Dawngate these cores were tied to each of the Guardians abilities, losing a core meant losing some of the protection that the Guardian provided to the defending team.

We decided to reduce the number of cores from Dawngate’s 5 to 4.The 5th outer core being too hard to protect to give it any meaningful ability.

Taming minions

Mox managed to push forward immensely with minions since the last minion update.

We also went through and merged a load of branches back into our master build.

During this merge we got some important changes merged into minions. Towers are now there, this was an important step as we needed to test the tower targeting AI. Mox completely re-wrote the way that minions find their targets whilst taking into account their own priority queue.

Our towers now spawn at server start, important for possible updates in the future and for server sync.

Due to the new map being laid out precisely, I was able to provide Mox with the perfect center of the lanes for the new map to guide the minions via waypoints.

Uncharted territory

Getting the map complete in such a short amount of time was really exciting, and seeing minions actually pathing, targeting and attacking correctly is hype.

The next step for minions is the advancement of their target searching AI and developing a “memory” to reduce system load on lower end systems. Once the melee minions are complete, ranged minions are to follow and we might even be able to play a test game!

I am in Boston for the rest of the week, drinking beer and hanging out with other members of o7 studios and going to PAX East next weekend!

This might mean that next week’s blog is a little light, but hopefully, you can appreciate that. Have a great week everyone, and if you have any questions about the map layout, wells or jungle just hop into our discord and ask in #aetherforged-talk.