This page tries to list a series of steps that must be accomplished to successfully complete the development of an adventure. The steps below should be roughly executed in that order. Iteration is also possible when designing 1 area at time. So pass through all the steps for desiging an area, when done repeat for another area.

That might be the best solution to be able to progressively test your adventure as it progress. The workflow below is not absolute, there could be a better working methods, it's just a suggestion. Changes might eventually be done with additional development and adventure design.

General Structure and Maze Areas

You need to know the global structure of your maze. Basically, the nb of floors you intend to use and maybe a maximum width. THe maze can hold up to 100x100x 20 levels, so you have a lot of space to work with.

The maze will be separated in areas. Areas are optional, you could only use 1 area. But areas are something you could use to your advantage. Basically a new area means a new palette of textures. So it will change how your maze look like. It also means a new table of monsters and events if you want to make a certain separation. They can also be used for determining outside areas. Areas can expanded to multiple floors, thay can be splitted in small fragment.

Eventually area will have a name that could be displayed when players get in. Think of areas like sub worlds in Metroid, or castle parts in castlevania symphony of the night. Another element related to areas are entrances. Adventures can support various ways to enter the maze. This can be used as shortcut to skip areas that the player already completed or it could be used to split your large maze into various separate buildings or caves that your player could explore. They will still all appear on the same map, even if you want them to be completely different locations.

Minimal Textures

At this step, you need to define textures for your adventure in order to get something else than blue wall displayed in the maze. But you should not bother about the esthetics yet. So simply select a wall, door, floor and ceiling texture you want that is going to be used for desiging and testing. If you have multiple areas, define those basic textures. Eventually, template adventures might come with predesigned texture set to prevent you from losing time doing that.

For the masked texture, use a basic square texture to mark special even location like they did it in the original wizardry game. You can then change them later when doing the esthetics. Same thing for objects. Define a multi purpose object like a vase or statue to mark event locations for the design of the adventure.

Maze Architecture

Now it's the time to draw the walls and doors of your maze. You could make a general layout on a piece of paper, but don't do the wall details since you'll only lose time. For drawing your maze, the editor is pretty simple and fast to design and draw at the same time. So you should start drawing directly in the editor.

While drawing, you could mark locations where you eventually want an event using light, texture or an object. Normally, you want to draw your maze before making your events because you do not know which events you are going to need.

Either draw the entire maze or one area at a time.

Encounter tables

It could be a good time to define your encounter tables. It does not need to be done now, but you should at least design the boss encounter because they will be required for the events. Enounter tables is simply predefined parties of monsters that could appear on a specific floor or maze area. Each monster has a certain percentage of appearing in the group. Use the following link to know how encounters are managed:

Maze Encounters

Events

When you have drawn your maze, it is time to list the events you are going to need. You have a limit of 255 events per area. I really doubt you can bust the limit, but you could have a very ambitious project. Events are reusable, so for example, a pit trap could be reused multiple time if in the same area.

When you have your list, insert them into the database and then go into the editor to link them at the right location in the maze.

Introduction and Ending

For the story you need pictures and text. The text is normally separated into paragraphs with a character limits of 1023 character. Each paragraph has a picture associated to it, so each time you change of paragraph, the picture is changed.

You simply need to add your pictures to the story subdatafile and insert the text into the database text table with the right picture ID.

Esthetics

Now it's the time to make your maze beautiful. There aer various aspects that needs to de defined:

First you need to setup your texture palettes for each area with textures you want. You must also determine the masked textures that are going to be placed above the regular maze textures for decorative or functionnal reasons. You will need to use the texture editor to set up your various texture configurations.

Second, you need to define your object palette. Objects can be used for decorations or mark an import part of the maze where an event could occur for example. So you need to define which object you want to use for each area of the maze.

Even if there is no restriction on where in the palette should a texture or another go, try to be consistent. If for example you place your wall lighting as object 04, then place all wall lighting in all areas as object 04. So if an area has torches and the other one has candles, if for any reason you need to change the area, the wall lighting will change from torches to candle without having to manually edit the object ID. That could save a lot of time when doing modifications.

Once your palette are set, it is time to use the editor tools to add those textures and objects to the maze. It can be long and tedious, this is why you want to do the esthetic stuff at the end to avoid changes that could occur during design.

Gameplay Modifications

I try to place most of the game's data into the database instead of inside the code to make sure the information could be easily modified. So if you want you can play with the game data to either retheme the game (replace swords with Assault Riffles) or either change the rules of the game by manipulating weapon data for example.

I don't suggest you modify this data as the user could be confused by the modifications. I do try to make the game as interesting and balanced as possible. But if for any reason I have not anticipated you want to change that information in your adventure, well you can do so.

So I hope this give you a rough idea of how the development of adventures can be done.