Thread: Haunted Mansion: An After-the-Fact WIP

Originally Posted by mogul76

Even though the red doors have not been drawn in a one-perspective manner , I think that the two maps which you posted in this thread are amazing. Nice light effects. Great atmosphere.

Good catch! The doors' perspective presented such an insurmountable problem that it almost caused me to abandon my multiple one-point perspective approach. Ultimately, despite several tries, I failed to come up with a visually pleasing way to place the doors in perspective.

Doors and walls are the only map elements that must be part of two rooms (or a room and a corridor) at the same time. Hence, walls and doors are the only elements that must be subject to multiple, incongruous rules of perspective. Forcing the walls to be part of multiple, separate perspectives creates some visual confusion. But, because they're everywhere and obviously the only division between rooms, the walls remain recognizable as walls. They're a little disturbing with their double sides, but they're clearly walls.

When I drew the doors in double perspective, they stopped resembling doors at all. They looked like strangely distorted red treasure chests. I tried adding handles and door knobs. I tried all kinds of things. Nothing worked, as the examples attached demonstrate. The problem grew worse where a door fell between two rooms whose vanishing points fell in completely different directions, twisting each side of a door in wholly different directions and creating absurd looking shapes. I don't have an example of this saved. The door on the left in the third image below comes closest, but that's not an extreme instance. Imagine a door with one side reaching up to the right and the other side reaching down to the left. Ugh!

So I decided to remove them from the whole perspective issue and just make them red rectangles. The result is less than perfect. But it was that or abandon the larger project. Anyone have a better idea?

Maybe a woodgrain texture on the doors would help them not look awkward when you add the perspective. *shrugs*

I tried wood first, actually. To me, the blocky constructs looked like weird furniture. They lost their appearance as doors. Worse, because of their massive size, they stole attention from the real furniture in the rooms. Ultimately, I just went with the thin red rectangles.

How about having the doors thinner than the walls? Or add a door frame on the sides, just something so it doesn't look like it's painted on the wall?

Are you planning to do the second floor?

How do you do the lighting effects in your maps?

I like it!

I've been looking for mansion type maps for a board game I've been working on based on the Thief computer games.

I was going to have one player setup the mansion, and one or more players try to steal things - but now I'm thinking of geomorph tiles for the mansion and automatic rules for setup.

Originally Posted by Alfar

How about having the doors thinner than the walls? Or add a door frame on the sides, just something so it doesn't look like it's painted on the wall?

I'm going to play with them more. I'll post the results. I've got something like 20 more WIP images to post and I'm trying to decide when best to fit in the doors.

Originally Posted by Aegeri

Are you planning to do the second floor?

I've always intended to do so. Other projects keep getting in the way. If and when I sell the adventure behind the maps to a publisher, the second floor will definitely burst into being!