... now with 35% more arrogance!

Saturday, December 11, 2010

Geomorph S1: Horn Pillars

There's been a lot of good geomorph creativity on the blogosphere, especially lately. Dyson Logos, Risus Monkey, Stonewerks, David Millar and JDJarvis. And all these are designed to work together, which is why David Millar was able to create a mapper app that uses the square geomorph sets. Man, I wish I were making some geomorphs...

... But I couldn't really see a niche that needed filling, until I thought of feature-specific geomorphs. You get a few kinds of features in the existing sets out there: pools, pits, chasms. But what about more specific, but still open to interpretation, so that you could add one or two "special" geomorphs to 5-8 from the other sets for an entire level?

I figured I'd kick off with something simple: a geomorph with a ring of horned pillars, based off that idea from the Torch, Pole, and Rope blog that I turned into some images (like this) not too long ago. I'm betting Michael Curtis's plan has something to do with the central ring being a gate, but there's no need to assume that circular object is a ring when you're looking at this overhead view: it might be a disk, might be a cylinder, might even be a concave basin, for flaming oil, or a glass sphere. It might be raised above the ground, or it might be a pit, with the chains attached to spikes around the rim. The small triangles are either brazier tripods or pylons/obelisks... or something else. Plenty of room for interpretation in this version.

This is going to be part of the "S" series, for Stonework and Statue Features. I'm not going to make these as often as the other guys: probably no more than one per week.

5 comments:

  1. looks cool. Please keep them coming.

    I've been keeping the extras out of my geomorphs to make sure they had a wider range of appeal. i'm sure someday the world will need 5x5 section with magma pools to go along with your posts.

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  2. Nifty thinking. Plenty of potential, and as you've shown, no harm is done to creativity - each can have multiple interpretations.

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  3. Have you told Dave Millar about it? He's a nice chap and is hungry for more morphs!

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  4. @Rob: Dave knows I was planning on doing some geomorphs, but I thought I'd wait until I had at least six done before suggesting that he'd add 'em.

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