Topic: Figuring out a room design

[Eric]

So this is a necessary room for the game I'm planning, and I'm trying to figure out how to best arrange / break down / design / draw it for AGS.

The blue circle is a spiral staircase that serves as the entrance/exit to the room. The purple dots are NPCs, and the arrows represent the way the characters are facing by default (though they can certainly turn to speak to /interact with the player character). The rectangle in the middle is a semi-transparent wall.

There are what are essentially floor to ceiling windows on each side of the room except the straight wall on the right.

I have some ideas about how to break this down into regions, and what POV to use, but am not sure if I'm thinking about it the right way. I thought I might pose the basics to you all and see what suggestions you have.

I can get more specific about what the room is if you need me to, but I wondered if some vagueness might help in this case. I've been thinking that my ideas have been too influenced by photographs.

(Also, not sure which is the best forum in which to ask this. Feel free to move it somewhere else!)

[cat]

Is this going to be a ship? I'd suggest two different views. I indicated in red where the view might be and did a quick mockup of room screens.



I did the foreground in black and anything that is behind glass/window is grey.

The question is: How good are you with perspective? The first room I suggested requires a bit of 2-point perspective. There are a lot of very good tutorials about that and if you understood how it works it's actually quite easy.

Good luck with your game!

[Eric]

Thanks for the input, Cat! Your ideas align with what I was thinking, which is reassuring, except I was looking at doing the first region in a one-point shot from the back. I think your two-point suggestion works better, and I might move the staircase to the other side of the gondola so it can be in the foreground to provide depth.

Since you've guessed, I will verify that this is indeed a ship, but an airship, not a...sea ship?

Room one, as you've labeled it here, will be the charts desk where the radio operator sits, as in this one from the Hindenburg:



And room two is the control car, like this one from the USS Macon (but wider):



Part of me wants to do a third area, if you walk all the way into the nose of the gondola (so all the way to the left of the schematic I drew), you would switch to a view from outside the ship -- from the same angle as the image below, but zoomed well in on the control car:



In my mind, this would (1) provide another view of one of the neater parts of the ship, (2), give some additional depth to the environment and (3) allow the captain to converse with the PC without turning away from the controls.

Would that work? Would it be strange to, when they have dialogue, see the words appear outside of the ship?

Thanks so much for the help. I'm trying to get functionality sorted before I commit (digital) paint to (digital) paper.

[Kweepa]

No wonder the Hindenburg exploded.
The pilot has no head.


...


Too soon?

[Eric]

There are some who say that, figuratively, you might be right. Some say the Hindenburg's structure was damaged by turning too tight, perhaps as a result of a battle of wills between acting captain Max Pruss and the Hindenburg's usual master, Ernst Lehmann.

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

My advice would be to use a freeware modeling program like google sketch up to test placements in a basic render at an angle you want the room to be viewable at and see how it looks.

[Eric]

Thanks to your brilliance, I've sought out someone with a full render, which is even better. Talk about overlooking the obvious. Thanks, Prog!