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These need rewriting, it was hot and boring on the train.
Rivers
I'm sure everybody has done history and geography at some point in school, but for those who haven't, or those who just forget when it comes to designing, writing, and mapping out their games, I thought a good idea for a column in the eZine would be a look at RPG gaming from the perspective of both. Now, I took History at A-level, and Geography at GCSE, but the things we learned were certainly useful enough to apply to a game – designing coastlines, kingdoms, and even weapons for the character to use.
In this issue I want to discuss rivers. While you might think it pedantic and a waste of time to spend time designing them properly, it can actually lead to some interesting land formations that otherwise might not have been thought of, making maps much more interesting and that little bit more realistic.
The first thing to cover is what a river actually is: a path formed by water as it flows from a high point to a low point. Actually, the river itself only really becomes a river when several streams meet one another in a significant flow, but the furthest one of these streams can be said to be a continuation of the main river. Basically where you have some land higher than some other land, any rain which hits the land will take the quickest path it can downhill – but only ever downhill and cannot climb along the way. It will follow any route it can to do this. The area in which all water flows into this one river is called the watershed of that river.
So at our beginning, at the source of each individual stream, we have small flows of rainwater sliding down a hill slowly trickling, until it meets more water and becomes a solid stream. This stream, as it moves, picks up rocks and moves them gradually along the surface of the ground. This seems insignificant to begin with, until we realise that over hundreds, thousands, millions of years this causes erosion that eventually leads to great canyons. Normally where a river is younger, say a few hundred years, all we have is a slightly sloped valley or even just river banks in a “V” shape (these are, unsurprisingly, called “V-shaped valleys”).
I said the water would take the quickest route possible. Not all rock is the same, some of it easier to erode than others, and the ground is not one continuous rock. This means as the water and the rocks it moves erode the land, it does so at different rates, even changing the course of the river entirely as the eroded land allows it to bypass formations it otherwise couldn't – or even making the river several hundred miles longer as the eroded land means it now cannot climb uphill to get back where it was!
Where the land erodes later down the river but not earlier, because of a change in rock types, we get a waterfall. Waterfalls are a vicious circle: as the waterfall gets higher it drops water further so further erodes the land below it. This creates a plunge pool beneath the waterfall that can be several metres below the actual bed of the main river. Gradually the waterfall begins to move backwards as the faster moving water becomes better at eroding the harder rock behind it.
Waterfalls occur where the water moves it's fastest – near the beginning of the river – with some smaller ones mid-way. As the water approaches the coast, further along, it becomes slower but also more powerful.
As the river is met by other streams it gains more and more water, becoming larger and wider. We've now hit the middle of the river and here it takes the form of a sweeping snake, a little slower than the earlier gushing streams.
Here where the land is much flatter the river tends to make sometimes spectacularly meandering turns around the smallest of hills (remember, a river cannot climb, it can only move downhill). You can see evidence of this on a map of Africa, where the Nile turns significantly back on itself part way. This creates more interesting landforms for us to take a look at and incorporate into our games.
In a river bend, the water moves faster on the inside of the bend and slower on the outside, like a running track. This means it erodes differently. The inside of the bend is gradually, but powerfully, eroded, moving the river over quite large distances over time. Eventually where we have a C shaped curve we end up with an O in the river. I mentioned earlier that the water always takes the quickest path: this means that one side of the O will go unused.
Remember all of the rocks we were moving along with us earlier? Well, as the water is slower at this point, the river cannot hold on to them and starts to deposit them – in it's slower places. In the case of our O, it drops these in the larger curve, and on the edges of the main now straighter flow, cutting off our earlier C and just creating a straight line of a river. This C-shaped water body is called an “Oxbow Lake”, and they are very common. The inside of such a lake is a good place to site a town as it's near to the main river, protected by a natural moat, and protected from the river itself moving as it's, for now at least, pretty stable.
Because as it goes along more and more streams will join the river, from the aforementioned watershed, the river gains more volume as it goes along, becoming wider. Eventually it becomes too wide for even bridges across which poses an interesting natural barrier for mapping.
At the end of the river it flows into the sea – and eventually the oceans – called the mouth. This is a good call for placenames around here: historically towns and cities have been founded next to rivers and named after features along them. For example, Exmouth is at the mouth of the river Exe, Cambridge and Ironbridge named after bridges on the course of rivers, and small towns such as Penkridge (river Penk) or Exeter also gain the names from rivers, often corrupted over the years by misspellings or just poor word of mouth.
It's interesting looking at the world maps of some pretty big games and seeing the glaring errors in their rivers – RuneScape comes to mind which has a river with two mouths! - one of them at the top of a mountain. The laws of physics may not always apply in games, but it can be interesting to try and get them right.
I think a lot of RPG Maker rivers suffer the flaw of their rivers being created by autotiles, or just tiles in general. The 32x32 tiles do not lend themselves well to creating rivers which also have smaller streams tricking into them, and waterfalls are difficult to create in large numbers without them being too spectacular in their nature. We can however create the terrain created by rivers: oxbow lakes creating natural moats, large meanders, boulders distributed near the source of a stream slowly rolling down the hillside, and most spectacularly the canyons left behind by rivers many millenia in age.
Rivers
I'm sure everybody has done history and geography at some point in school, but for those who haven't, or those who just forget when it comes to designing, writing, and mapping out their games, I thought a good idea for a column in the eZine would be a look at RPG gaming from the perspective of both. Now, I took History at A-level, and Geography at GCSE, but the things we learned were certainly useful enough to apply to a game – designing coastlines, kingdoms, and even weapons for the character to use.
In this issue I want to discuss rivers. While you might think it pedantic and a waste of time to spend time designing them properly, it can actually lead to some interesting land formations that otherwise might not have been thought of, making maps much more interesting and that little bit more realistic.
The first thing to cover is what a river actually is: a path formed by water as it flows from a high point to a low point. Actually, the river itself only really becomes a river when several streams meet one another in a significant flow, but the furthest one of these streams can be said to be a continuation of the main river. Basically where you have some land higher than some other land, any rain which hits the land will take the quickest path it can downhill – but only ever downhill and cannot climb along the way. It will follow any route it can to do this. The area in which all water flows into this one river is called the watershed of that river.
So at our beginning, at the source of each individual stream, we have small flows of rainwater sliding down a hill slowly trickling, until it meets more water and becomes a solid stream. This stream, as it moves, picks up rocks and moves them gradually along the surface of the ground. This seems insignificant to begin with, until we realise that over hundreds, thousands, millions of years this causes erosion that eventually leads to great canyons. Normally where a river is younger, say a few hundred years, all we have is a slightly sloped valley or even just river banks in a “V” shape (these are, unsurprisingly, called “V-shaped valleys”).
I said the water would take the quickest route possible. Not all rock is the same, some of it easier to erode than others, and the ground is not one continuous rock. This means as the water and the rocks it moves erode the land, it does so at different rates, even changing the course of the river entirely as the eroded land allows it to bypass formations it otherwise couldn't – or even making the river several hundred miles longer as the eroded land means it now cannot climb uphill to get back where it was!
Where the land erodes later down the river but not earlier, because of a change in rock types, we get a waterfall. Waterfalls are a vicious circle: as the waterfall gets higher it drops water further so further erodes the land below it. This creates a plunge pool beneath the waterfall that can be several metres below the actual bed of the main river. Gradually the waterfall begins to move backwards as the faster moving water becomes better at eroding the harder rock behind it.
Waterfalls occur where the water moves it's fastest – near the beginning of the river – with some smaller ones mid-way. As the water approaches the coast, further along, it becomes slower but also more powerful.
As the river is met by other streams it gains more and more water, becoming larger and wider. We've now hit the middle of the river and here it takes the form of a sweeping snake, a little slower than the earlier gushing streams.
Here where the land is much flatter the river tends to make sometimes spectacularly meandering turns around the smallest of hills (remember, a river cannot climb, it can only move downhill). You can see evidence of this on a map of Africa, where the Nile turns significantly back on itself part way. This creates more interesting landforms for us to take a look at and incorporate into our games.
In a river bend, the water moves faster on the inside of the bend and slower on the outside, like a running track. This means it erodes differently. The inside of the bend is gradually, but powerfully, eroded, moving the river over quite large distances over time. Eventually where we have a C shaped curve we end up with an O in the river. I mentioned earlier that the water always takes the quickest path: this means that one side of the O will go unused.
Remember all of the rocks we were moving along with us earlier? Well, as the water is slower at this point, the river cannot hold on to them and starts to deposit them – in it's slower places. In the case of our O, it drops these in the larger curve, and on the edges of the main now straighter flow, cutting off our earlier C and just creating a straight line of a river. This C-shaped water body is called an “Oxbow Lake”, and they are very common. The inside of such a lake is a good place to site a town as it's near to the main river, protected by a natural moat, and protected from the river itself moving as it's, for now at least, pretty stable.
Because as it goes along more and more streams will join the river, from the aforementioned watershed, the river gains more volume as it goes along, becoming wider. Eventually it becomes too wide for even bridges across which poses an interesting natural barrier for mapping.
At the end of the river it flows into the sea – and eventually the oceans – called the mouth. This is a good call for placenames around here: historically towns and cities have been founded next to rivers and named after features along them. For example, Exmouth is at the mouth of the river Exe, Cambridge and Ironbridge named after bridges on the course of rivers, and small towns such as Penkridge (river Penk) or Exeter also gain the names from rivers, often corrupted over the years by misspellings or just poor word of mouth.
It's interesting looking at the world maps of some pretty big games and seeing the glaring errors in their rivers – RuneScape comes to mind which has a river with two mouths! - one of them at the top of a mountain. The laws of physics may not always apply in games, but it can be interesting to try and get them right.
I think a lot of RPG Maker rivers suffer the flaw of their rivers being created by autotiles, or just tiles in general. The 32x32 tiles do not lend themselves well to creating rivers which also have smaller streams tricking into them, and waterfalls are difficult to create in large numbers without them being too spectacular in their nature. We can however create the terrain created by rivers: oxbow lakes creating natural moats, large meanders, boulders distributed near the source of a stream slowly rolling down the hillside, and most spectacularly the canyons left behind by rivers many millenia in age.
Interesting Coastlines
Last month I introduced some knowledge of rivers to our game making; this month I want to try and bring in some other natural features created by water by discussing coasts.
The coastline is a rather neglected aspect in a lot of RPG Maker games. Usually if you're at the coast you're either at an abrupt end of the land where the cliffs drop straight down into dead waters, or you're at a beach, which continues straight from grass to water with little transition between the two. Now this isn't necessarily a bad thing but I thought it would be interesting to explore these features and how they are made to try and bring a sense of realism to level design.
Firstly, we need to know how the coast itself is created. Basically a coast is just an area where the land meets the sea, created by tectonic plate movements and whatnot; all we need to know is that rocks meet sea, and the sea acts upon the rocks with immense force along the way. Cliffs are not made of one type of rock (we discussed this in a previous issue on rivers) meaning some rocks are much harder than others. In our games, we can represent these quite accurately, but some simple cliff tiles will probably suffice. Sandstone is hard, as is granite. Limestone and clay are soft. Chalk is I believe somewhere in the middle.
There tend to be lines where two types of rock meet, in a zebra-crossing pattern of hard, harder soft, hard, etc. This all has much influence on how the sea erodes (or doesn't erode) each bit of rock. You can probably guess what happens, but won't realise the features this creates: what we end up with is a wavy line of sticky-out-bits (“headland”) and bits curving inwards wherever the rock is weaker (“bays”). In these bays the water has been slowed down by the headstones, and as we discussed on rivers, where water is slower it tends to drop whatever it is carrying. In this case this is sand, and so in these bays is where we end up with our beaches.
Water is forced in at whatever direction the waves are moving. When it comes back out again it is slower, and so instead follows the contours of the land – this means it goes in one direction and out another – and it takes the sand along with it. This process, called “longshore drift”, makes the beaches move along the coast. So, your map will have two headlands with a beach in the middle – but the sand will be mostly pushed up against one of the headlands in particular.
When erosion does finally manage to break it's way through the headland it creates some interesting geological features which we will get to shortly; for now all we need to know is that when it does break through the beach can be snatched altogether and end up further down the coast. Sandy beaches slow down the water decreasing erosion, so in contrast, when the beach is taken away, the land is much more vulnerable. This leaves any settlements on top in a very precarious position!
So what are these interesting features created by the erosion of the headland? You'll recognise a lot of them from the best coastal photographs, and they're all created in the same way. First, we need to be talking about a very specific type of headland – a thin strip between two bays open and at risk of erosion. The water also has to be hitting it from the right angle for it to erode horizontally through the thin peninsular.
As the water is at the bottom of the landmass and not eroding the top at all, we first of all end up with a cave, carved out of the side of the rock. This cave gradually gets deeper and deeper, working it's way through the rock. These caves will make interesting locations in games, but a more unique feature is what happens when the back of the wall is broken through, as it creates a sea arch. This arch can be wide enough for boats to pass through. It would make a good transition between two coastal maps as it creates a pinch point perfect for the teleport events and such.
The rock continues to be eroded, and if there is soil on top it is worn down from above at the same time, and eventually if the rock is low enough the top of the cave collapses, forming boulders at the bottom of the cave. We now have a shorter headland and a structure called a stack at the end. There can be multiple stacks, in a long line, along a headland and they make a really interesting landscape – the RPG Maker XP tilesets actually come with tiles for stacks and the boulders inbetween them but I have never seen them used in their correct context.
Eventually the stack gets eroded around the base being shaped gradually to resemble an egg-timer. Eventually the top just falls off and crumbles into the sea. This leaves a sharp point sticking out of the water – called a needle.
All of this makes for very dangerous sailing for anybody approaching by boat or ship. Lighthouses, rather than being located on land as often in RPG Maker games, are usually located at the end of a headland – on a large enough needle – to stop boats hitting the stacks and fallen rocks between them.
Who said coasts had to be boring?
Last month I introduced some knowledge of rivers to our game making; this month I want to try and bring in some other natural features created by water by discussing coasts.
The coastline is a rather neglected aspect in a lot of RPG Maker games. Usually if you're at the coast you're either at an abrupt end of the land where the cliffs drop straight down into dead waters, or you're at a beach, which continues straight from grass to water with little transition between the two. Now this isn't necessarily a bad thing but I thought it would be interesting to explore these features and how they are made to try and bring a sense of realism to level design.
Firstly, we need to know how the coast itself is created. Basically a coast is just an area where the land meets the sea, created by tectonic plate movements and whatnot; all we need to know is that rocks meet sea, and the sea acts upon the rocks with immense force along the way. Cliffs are not made of one type of rock (we discussed this in a previous issue on rivers) meaning some rocks are much harder than others. In our games, we can represent these quite accurately, but some simple cliff tiles will probably suffice. Sandstone is hard, as is granite. Limestone and clay are soft. Chalk is I believe somewhere in the middle.
There tend to be lines where two types of rock meet, in a zebra-crossing pattern of hard, harder soft, hard, etc. This all has much influence on how the sea erodes (or doesn't erode) each bit of rock. You can probably guess what happens, but won't realise the features this creates: what we end up with is a wavy line of sticky-out-bits (“headland”) and bits curving inwards wherever the rock is weaker (“bays”). In these bays the water has been slowed down by the headstones, and as we discussed on rivers, where water is slower it tends to drop whatever it is carrying. In this case this is sand, and so in these bays is where we end up with our beaches.
Water is forced in at whatever direction the waves are moving. When it comes back out again it is slower, and so instead follows the contours of the land – this means it goes in one direction and out another – and it takes the sand along with it. This process, called “longshore drift”, makes the beaches move along the coast. So, your map will have two headlands with a beach in the middle – but the sand will be mostly pushed up against one of the headlands in particular.
When erosion does finally manage to break it's way through the headland it creates some interesting geological features which we will get to shortly; for now all we need to know is that when it does break through the beach can be snatched altogether and end up further down the coast. Sandy beaches slow down the water decreasing erosion, so in contrast, when the beach is taken away, the land is much more vulnerable. This leaves any settlements on top in a very precarious position!
So what are these interesting features created by the erosion of the headland? You'll recognise a lot of them from the best coastal photographs, and they're all created in the same way. First, we need to be talking about a very specific type of headland – a thin strip between two bays open and at risk of erosion. The water also has to be hitting it from the right angle for it to erode horizontally through the thin peninsular.
As the water is at the bottom of the landmass and not eroding the top at all, we first of all end up with a cave, carved out of the side of the rock. This cave gradually gets deeper and deeper, working it's way through the rock. These caves will make interesting locations in games, but a more unique feature is what happens when the back of the wall is broken through, as it creates a sea arch. This arch can be wide enough for boats to pass through. It would make a good transition between two coastal maps as it creates a pinch point perfect for the teleport events and such.
The rock continues to be eroded, and if there is soil on top it is worn down from above at the same time, and eventually if the rock is low enough the top of the cave collapses, forming boulders at the bottom of the cave. We now have a shorter headland and a structure called a stack at the end. There can be multiple stacks, in a long line, along a headland and they make a really interesting landscape – the RPG Maker XP tilesets actually come with tiles for stacks and the boulders inbetween them but I have never seen them used in their correct context.
Eventually the stack gets eroded around the base being shaped gradually to resemble an egg-timer. Eventually the top just falls off and crumbles into the sea. This leaves a sharp point sticking out of the water – called a needle.
All of this makes for very dangerous sailing for anybody approaching by boat or ship. Lighthouses, rather than being located on land as often in RPG Maker games, are usually located at the end of a headland – on a large enough needle – to stop boats hitting the stacks and fallen rocks between them.
Who said coasts had to be boring?
Ultimate Weapons
So often it's the plot of a role playing game: the evil overlord, because they are evil, has created the Ultimate Weapon and is going to destroy the world with it. Despite having the technology to do this the rest of the world lives in relative dark ages – a world of farm hands and straw houses. Regardless of this apparent inability to fight back, the evil overlord feels need to create a weapon so powerful that it will only end in one thing: the destruction of the whole world.
This is not how history has worked thus far. We ended up at the atom bomb, but got there because we had other weapons we needed to defend ourselves against. Not to put anyone off having a mad evil overlord destroy the world in their games, I nonetheless want to discuss how we ourselves ended up with such weapons and what it could mean for an interesting backstory.
For the first few centuries – millenia even – there was very little military progress. Yes, we moved from spear heads made of rock to spear heads made of metal, and then proceeded to turn these into swords, but relatively speaking for much of the human age we have been slow to produce better weaponry. This all changed in the 18th century. After the invention of the rifle, we then had the flint-lock rifle – a much better gun than that which required a match to be lit in order to fire. Guns became central to all of the big wars, the first biggie being the French revolution. Napoleon was educated at a Lyvee in the art of artillery: big guns. A big user of grape shot (a great load of shrapnel in a cannon, working like a nail bomb) he made guns big, and to combat this, the other nations around France did the same. Eventually guns became ubiquitous and the main bulk of each of the big armies was made up of columns of riflemen.
When each army became the same, we reached what we call an “arms race”. The British started wearing green to camouflage themselves, so the French followed suit. One nation invented the machine gun: another followed up with a better machine gun. Artillery was countered with bigger artillery. Mass lines of troops countered with machine guns. Machine guns countered with barricades and battlements. Fortifications countered with tanks. Tanks countered with anti-tank guns. Anti-tank guns countered with air bombers. Air bombers countered with anti-aircraft guns. And, ultimately, everything countered with the atom bomb.
Throughout all of the ways the simplest winner was always going to be the better equipped one (be that equipped by technology, brainpower, or luck). To counter this countries always had to become better than their partner. America didn't invent the atom bomb on a whim: it had to, to counter the bombs being sent it's way beforehand. It was a deterrent (although, unfortunately, used twice at Nagasaki and Hiroshima). America had atom bombs, so Russia followed suit. America had several so Russia needed several more. Eventually this stockpiling lead to us having enough to wipe out the entire planet if we wanted to. It happened gradually, not all in one go.
An interesting villain might be one who creates a doomsday device because they're bored. A much more believable villain is one who has access to doomsday devices that have been built up over centuries of fighting, especially when the enemy is perfectly within their abilities to counter it with another doomsday device of their own.
It is unlikely that anybody would have happened upon an atom bomb in the middle of 1066 Hastings. Neither side needed them, and if they had access to machine guns they would have used those instead. Necessity is the mother of invention, that's true, but even more-so, needlessness is the mother of mundanity. We didn't need a doomsday device, so instead we settled on a Domesday book. (Ho, ho, ho.)
So often it's the plot of a role playing game: the evil overlord, because they are evil, has created the Ultimate Weapon and is going to destroy the world with it. Despite having the technology to do this the rest of the world lives in relative dark ages – a world of farm hands and straw houses. Regardless of this apparent inability to fight back, the evil overlord feels need to create a weapon so powerful that it will only end in one thing: the destruction of the whole world.
This is not how history has worked thus far. We ended up at the atom bomb, but got there because we had other weapons we needed to defend ourselves against. Not to put anyone off having a mad evil overlord destroy the world in their games, I nonetheless want to discuss how we ourselves ended up with such weapons and what it could mean for an interesting backstory.
For the first few centuries – millenia even – there was very little military progress. Yes, we moved from spear heads made of rock to spear heads made of metal, and then proceeded to turn these into swords, but relatively speaking for much of the human age we have been slow to produce better weaponry. This all changed in the 18th century. After the invention of the rifle, we then had the flint-lock rifle – a much better gun than that which required a match to be lit in order to fire. Guns became central to all of the big wars, the first biggie being the French revolution. Napoleon was educated at a Lyvee in the art of artillery: big guns. A big user of grape shot (a great load of shrapnel in a cannon, working like a nail bomb) he made guns big, and to combat this, the other nations around France did the same. Eventually guns became ubiquitous and the main bulk of each of the big armies was made up of columns of riflemen.
When each army became the same, we reached what we call an “arms race”. The British started wearing green to camouflage themselves, so the French followed suit. One nation invented the machine gun: another followed up with a better machine gun. Artillery was countered with bigger artillery. Mass lines of troops countered with machine guns. Machine guns countered with barricades and battlements. Fortifications countered with tanks. Tanks countered with anti-tank guns. Anti-tank guns countered with air bombers. Air bombers countered with anti-aircraft guns. And, ultimately, everything countered with the atom bomb.
Throughout all of the ways the simplest winner was always going to be the better equipped one (be that equipped by technology, brainpower, or luck). To counter this countries always had to become better than their partner. America didn't invent the atom bomb on a whim: it had to, to counter the bombs being sent it's way beforehand. It was a deterrent (although, unfortunately, used twice at Nagasaki and Hiroshima). America had atom bombs, so Russia followed suit. America had several so Russia needed several more. Eventually this stockpiling lead to us having enough to wipe out the entire planet if we wanted to. It happened gradually, not all in one go.
An interesting villain might be one who creates a doomsday device because they're bored. A much more believable villain is one who has access to doomsday devices that have been built up over centuries of fighting, especially when the enemy is perfectly within their abilities to counter it with another doomsday device of their own.
It is unlikely that anybody would have happened upon an atom bomb in the middle of 1066 Hastings. Neither side needed them, and if they had access to machine guns they would have used those instead. Necessity is the mother of invention, that's true, but even more-so, needlessness is the mother of mundanity. We didn't need a doomsday device, so instead we settled on a Domesday book. (Ho, ho, ho.)