Scene Types & Guidelines for the Old Realms

This guide serves as formal rules that must be accounted for when creating scenes (Maps) for the Old Realms mod. When designing a map, these guidelines should be followed to fulfill a purpose and be accurate to the lore. This will help maintain organisation and categorise maps.

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The Logic:

The Scene editor of Bannerlord has a multitude of functionalities and allows the creation of all kinds of missions.

However, from a game design perspective, we need to limit ourselves.

1. Without specific guidelines, it is easy for too much work to go into a single map. Either the map design becomes too ambitious, or since there are no specific guidelines for the task, it becomes hard to plan at all. We have chosen constant, incremental updates over large content dumps to ensure we do not get stuck spending too much time on individual tasks or items.

2. Gameplay-wise, a map must fulfil certain requirements for a player to find it enjoyable. It is important to remember that players will be navigating these maps for the first time, with no prior knowledge of where to go, etc. Maps and overall design should serve the player.

3. From a coding perspective, we plan to provide custom logic systems for scenes and quests for our mod. From the perspective of maintainability, scenes must be structured in a way that this requirement can be satisfied and is manageable in the long term. Testing functional scenes, such as a quest-related map, is a huge venture involving several subsystems working together. By limiting the number of encounterable possibilities inside a scene, we reduce the required testing – or make it more manageable.

We want to narrow down scene creation to certain mission types.  We have some definitions to help in the creation of these mission types.

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Definitions:

 

Traversable Area

Walkable and interactable area for the player. The “foreground” of a scene.  Opposite to the backdrop.

 

Backdrop:

It defines the area the player can’t interact with or is not reachable in general. However, since the player is not involved in any form of interaction here. Be mindful of the proportion of the backdrop and the actual traversable area. In general, the backdrop should be large in comparison to the traversable area. In general, distant objects don’t need the level of detail of very close ones.

Backdrops could allow for several interesting visual phenomena that could be accounted for from a 3D and coding perspective.

 

Landmarks:

Point of interest on the map, which serves as a sole visual aspect. It could serve as an obstacle; however, according to the Scene type, it should not hinder the overall gameplay experience besides blocking the traversable area. It would be recommended to place them in the backdrop of a scene.

Buildings that can be entered are not considered landmarks; they serve gameplay aspects and, therefore, can’t be a component of a landmark.

 

Point of interest:

The point of interest is the focal point of a player's mission. For Example, dialogue with a character or fighting another army.

The point of interest is the focused point of a map. Planned from the perspective of the player, to keep an enjoyable experience, the travel time to a point of interest must be kept short to deliver a compelling gameplay experience.

 

Indoor Scenes:

 Rooms that can be traversed by humans and sometimes also mounts. They could have narrow ceilings.  Caves (for example, a bandit hideout) or scenes with tunnels also fall under this category.

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Outdoor scenes:

A scene can only be considered as an ‘Outdoor scene’ if it is fully traversable without interiors; artillery and mounts should also be usable.  For bigger battle maps, it is a requirement that artillery is not hindered in its usage.

Level of detail

Indoor missions are generally more detailed than outdoor scenes. The larger a map gets, the more mindful you should be about the usage of smaller assets in those areas and the amount of attention and work you spend on detail

 

Scene Types:

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Dialogue Scenes

Dialogue scenes are designed to interact with an NPC without fights. The dialogue could be a trade or the initiation of a quest. The travel time to a point of interest in question should be kept to a minimum. It is encouraged to use lots of backdrops inside such scenes and have a high level of details and small assets. They are highly interwoven with code and are very important in a task list. Dialogue scenes should be exclusively indoor scenes or should not involve any form of riding of the player.

Average size: Single room up to several smaller rooms.

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Examples: engineer's office, magic spell library, tavern.

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Brawl Scenes

Brawl scenes are in between normal battle maps and dialogue scenes. Fighting is possible, as well as dialogue and scripted events. They are primarily for quests.  They provide limited use of units, mostly infantry (especially in indoor missions) and, in very rare cases, also mounts. Spells are restricted (depending on if it’s an outdoor mission and provides enough space) to less AOE-intensive ones, and there is no option to use artillery in such. 

The overall intention is to provide a wide range of gameplay variety. It would be nice to have triggered events, like falling down a trap door or spawning an enemy horde.  Brawl scenes could be, therefore, script intensive, require lots of testing and should be used with care.

Average size: 200m²

 

Examples: quest mission, dungeons, bandit raid, keep the interaction

 

Town, Village, Castle Scenes:

Smaller towns and villages function as they do in native Bannerlord and have several phases in which you can interact with them. From walks in the town to sieges and so forth. If possible, there should be different sizes of cities, instead of just towns or villages. Similar rules apply to Bannerlord missions, and the map layout should also suit them.

It would be beneficial to rework existing maps. If paths are not changed and bigger visual changes are restricted to unreachable areas, maps could be created relatively quickly.

If complete custom-made maps serve this purpose completely, they would work here as well.

Towns can’t account for the tremendous size of a metropolis. For the metropolis, we would like to plan a different mechanic.

Average size: Cities in vanilla Bannerlord.

 

Examples: small towns, villages, or castles of classic Bannerlord.

 

Metropolis and City District Scenes:

A large Metropolis should work differently than in classic Bannerlord. Empire cities are tremendous in size and proportions. Since we want to make it appear like the player is interacting with the ‘whole’ city, there have to be some trade-offs. These cities are therefore separated into several scenic locations (Much like the Imperial City in ES Oblivion). These can be entered, or the player is spawned into certain types of missions during events.

The metropolis contains a city core that serves the regular city logic of Bannerlord, with all notables in a set location for this city. This can be, for example, a marketplace, the main town hall and in some special cases, a big cathedral of the said town.

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The travel time to the points of interest must be accounted for. Making use of backdrops to give the player the feeling of being in an enormous city is recommended. Besides the city core, there can be several sub-scenes inside the town. This could include a harbour district, a cathedral, or a dark alley. Districts thereby serve on the level of a “brawl scene”, mounts are usually not allowed here. Here, again, the creator must make use of backdrops to convey the size of a town. Different towns offer different districts since not every town district shares the same notable landmarks.

Siege scenes do not happen (solely) in the core scene of a metropolis. For this, we will make use of siege scene layering. Therefore, walls do not have to be part of the scene.

Metropolises are restricted to the main town or capital of a region.

 

Examples: Altdorf, Nuln, Middenheim

 

Siege Scenes:

Besieging a metropolis would work differently than in vanilla; if possible, we would aim to have a layered siege system with different phases or stages of a battle. That would take the form of:

The siege of the city or town walls (large-scale battle with siege).
A fight in the streets or parts of the city (small-scale battle or brawl scene).
A final fight in the town keep or lords hall.

There could potentially be more, and depending on the method used to attack, it should differ ( Skaven, Naval raid of harbour). The complexity of the fights and creating the required game logic is a component of the tremendous effort that goes into such scenes. Therefore, this feature can only be possible for a very limited number of cities.

The Siege scene (of the wall) is the only partially indoor scene type that allows for artillery and mounts. 

 

Example: Siege Middenheim, Altdorf, or Helmgart.

 

Small-scale battle Scenes:

It's the usual battle map. Mostly in normal forests or fields. The map should work with the new battle terrain system, so it's navigable from many attack directions. The use of landmarks should be limited but recognizable.

Fights occur in very low populated areas or extremely oversized plazas inside a town. In contrast to large-scale battles, the maps can make use of more assets, but the design should not hinder troops. Artillery and horses need to be usable. Besides very few exceptions it has to be considered as an outdoor scene.

 

Large-Scale Battle Scenes:

Similar to the above but even more restrictive. The actual battle should not differ from Bannerlord's large-scale map and can only use backdrops and a very limited amount of landmarks to add diversity.

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