Once you have played with the different demos, before starting your own game with WMSK you need to think about two main topics:
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Decide the world structure (eg. will my game include provinces or just countries? Will I make my own map or use the provided world map?).
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Choose one of the 3 available representations: normal 2D flat map, viewport or terrain mode.
World Structure
WMSK provides complete country and provinces frontiers, as well as a large catalogue of most important cities around the world. From a strategy game design perspective, there are several options to leverage the content provided in the asset:
Option 1: Countries only
In this mode, provinces and cities are hidden and players are offered a world map based on countries where they can select and interact with those selections (quiz games, global strategy games, …).
You can use the events OnCountryEnter, OnCountryClick, OnCountryExit for example, to react to player interaction. To illustrate the ownership of a country you could either colorize then, using methods like ToggleCountrySurface, or adding markers (like flag sprites) on the center of each country.
In this mode, both high and low resolution frontiers can be used. For older mobile devices you may want to use the low-resolution frontiers.
Option 2: Provinces only
In this mode, provinces are the key to the game. Countries are visible but they don’t highlight when player moves the pointer. As with countries, you can make use of events like OnProvinceEnter, OnProvinceClick, OnProvinceExit, as well as ToggleProvinceRegionSurface to color individual provinces and show ownership.
In this mode, the high-resolution frontiers should be used to ensure borders of countries and provinces match.
Option 3: Countries + provinces
This is a mixture of previous modes. Both countries and provinces are highlighted when player moves the pointer over them. When players click on a province, events are fired for both the country and the province.
In this mode, the high-resolution frontiers should be used to ensure borders of countries and provinces match.
Option 4: Cities and MountPoints
In addition to the previous 3 modes, you could add cities and ‘mountpoints’.
Each city has some interesting attributes that you can use in your game, like country and province to which belong, metropolitan population and class (country capital, regional capital or normal city).
MountPoints are created by you using the Editor or the API. They are not visible during play mode but they represent strategic locations across the map that you could use to populate your custom markers or possible destinations.