Auto-map

When I first started playing computerized role-playing games when I was a kid, most of the games did not have an automated mapping feature. This meant that in order to go through the game you had to draw your own maps. While creating a map certainly has an element of immersion to it, there is also a frustration aspect to it. I think that one reason for this was due to the fact that the pen and paper role-playing games that the computerized games were modeled after pretty much required that the players make maps. Still, making maps is a mundane task and is something that the computer is quite capable of handling.

When you think about it, having an auto-map feature is very simple to do as the game already has the map info. The only thing that needs to be tracked is the locations on the map that the player has been and/or seen. Even then, if you are drawing the auto-map as the player plays then even this information doesn't need to be tracked as one simply needs to draw the information onto the map as the game progresses.

Drawing the map is the complex part. If you wanted to get fancy, you could create icons for the different types of tiles that make up the game world and display those as the auto-map. Simple color blocks, which can be drawn using the Java graphics API, works fine and is very simple to implement so that is what I went with.

At the start of the game, the map image is covered with a solid gray block. Movement reveals map. This is very simple. The location the player is at is worked out and a 3x3 chunk of the map around the player is drawn onto the auto-map image. The player's location on the map is then drawn using the graphics APIs oval function.