One of the things that having all text links for exits in Grotto accomplished was that any amount of exits could be added to a room and there was no need to figure out where to place them spatially. Mud Room is returning to a spatial representation of a room and exits, so this problem will need to be dealt with. Generally in a videogame we would make a room bigger to accommodate more exits. This makes me think that, like swordquest, there will be an “outer” side of a room, which shows exits, and then an “inner” side, which is the cenotaph, and is a more 2d conception that holds objects. This frees up the outer version to be shown and traversed in any way we like. This is the most poorly defined part of the game so far.
One idea that came up in my tutorials with Jenna was a 180degree projection mapped stage, with a small central screen that represented the player figure. the figure animates but stays centered as the world rotates or moves around it. There could be some central landmark that moving to switches the display to the internal version.
If I decided to switch to unity or another game engine for that ‘outer’ area play, it could still be loading a web page for the inner cenotaphs.
One issue I have with this idea- I hate the idea of zooming in on rasterized images, especially of pencil art. If I am doing pencil art, I want it to maintain a resolution, as if a 3d diagram is being drawn on a single piece of paper. This might be an impetus to not move the environment around- the walls of the “box” are the walls of the room, as projected- which means the characters never feels like its walking anywhere, or an argument for sticking to Looom style vector strokes, which also have the advantage of being colorful, but would be less expressive and evocative than pencil art.
