About this image

What you see here is the heightmap for the first playable region in RoA -- Aquillonia -- the troubled heart of the Empire (and yes, the interior looks quite rough, but rest assured that, since the time of this post, it's been made a bit smoother for travel).

Note that the decision to return to a game design with a traversible overworld did not happen until recently. For a while, I was going forward under the premise of capturing the entire world of Arkania, albeit cut into many small worldspaces/fast travel points, Arena/Daggerfall style. But I just couldn't follow through with it. The idea of organizing the world into worldspaces was fine (something I'm still implementing today -- Aquillonia is what I hope to be the first episode in a series), but the idea of constant fast travel seemed to sap the magic from Arkania somehow. I recall those early releases of RoA, and how much I enjoyed just moving from one area to the next on foot. Never mind that the landscapes were long and stagnant, or that I didn't have the correct assets here or there, but there was just something really special about having that sense of distance between me and my destination, no matter the level of true-to-book detail in my surroundings. I'm sure many of this project's followers would agree that the sheer size of the world (or perhaps more accurately stated, the length of their travels, as per my technique, my worlds have always been engineered for density, not size) was the first thing they noticed -- not necessarily the lack of NPCs, etc.

So this is my way of saying "I'm back." At least in terms of getting back to the roots of Arkania's world design and where its charm is. Also I realize that this is the first screenshot of my actual progress in the CS since May. Wow. Time sure flies. But I've had a lot of time to really flesh out this world and its lore over the past four months (over 200 pages now), and that said, I feel that much more confident going back into the open-world approach.

As for playable content, don't expect anything like full questlines emerging any time soon, much less any NPCs at all aside from guards and merchants (due to a bug keeping me from accessing dialogue). For now, my only real concern is building something players can walk around in and interact with. Once we've established that much, the rest can come into play, but I'm not going to worry too much about the future anymore. Ambition is great, but I believe that such a mindset, to the extreme, was to blame for much of the stress I had with this project earlier this year.

The secret to getting through a long-term project like Arkania?
Try not to focus so much on how far you have left to go, but on how far you have come already.
Otherwise, you will always feel resource-poor. And that is a deceptive thought, given how the future is already developed and the present is still developing.