Pendekar

It started with a question

Not a plan, a question. Talking through why RuneScape caught on (it ran in a browser, it was free, the skills rewarded time, and the world felt shared) led straight to the next message: let's make a game with the same mechanics, but change the theme, the weapons and the map, and start with a small one.

The setting came quickly. Malaysia, with silat for the weapons and skills and armour named for the culture. Terengganu was the first idea for a starting place. Then a better one: begin on the Perhentian Islands as a training ground, and take a boat to the mainland. That gave the game its tutorial, its first chapter, and its first quest.

Brinefall, a throwaway island

Before any of the Malaysian world existed, a small test island on a flat 2D canvas: 44 by 30 tiles, a tick loop, click-to-walk pathfinding, trees to cut, fish to net, a fire to cook at and crabs to avoid. It proved the loop worked and was then set aside.

Pendekar, the whole game in 2D

The first real build. A 60 by 40 world with two islands grown from seeded noise, so every player gets the same map. Eight-direction pathfinding that refuses to squeeze through diagonal gaps. The RuneScape XP table. Seven skills, a 20-slot pack, crafting at the boatyard, two monsters with their own tempers, Guru's tutorial quest, and a save in the browser.

It was checked before it was looked at: object counts, monster counts and whether every tree and fishing spot could be reached from the beach were tested in a headless run. Palm trees came up short the first time, so the beaches got more of them.

Too rubbish, so: low-poly 3D

The 2D tiles went. In their place, a three.js renderer in the low-poly style: the tile map becomes a heightfield that rises gently inland, the sea is a translucent plane with a scrolling texture and foam strips along every shore, a sun casts soft shadows, and fog settles over the far water. Every tree, palm, fire, boat frame and creature is built from a few primitives, coloured per vertex and merged into one flat-shaded mesh.

The camera orbits the player freely, with drag, scroll, pinch and arrow keys, and a compass to face north. The game logic did not change at all. The renderer was swapped underneath it. On top came the interface: right-click menus, hover labels in the familiar colours, hitsplats, XP drops, and a minimap with a wedge showing where the camera looks.

English first

The first builds led with Malay: Tukang Kayu, Nelayan, unggun, bengkel. Reading them cold was work. The names were flipped so English leads and the Malay sits beside it, in the Skills tab and in every item tooltip. Guru still says toya and perahu, and explains them the first time.

Bigger islands, fewer trees

The world grew from 60 by 40 to 90 by 60 tiles, about 2.2 times the land. Cuttable trees dropped from around 100 to 29, palms to 9, with more open grass between them. To keep the bigger island busy, fishing spots went up to 18 and the monsters to 21: fourteen crabs on the beaches and seven monitor lizards in the jungle.

People with necks

The character rig was rebuilt: a neck, shoulders, a slimmer waist, a jaw, ears, a nose and a mouth. More important for later, every visible garment became a slot: hat, top, belt or sarong, trousers, shoes, vest, weapon. An item can swap any of them, which is what shops will need. Guru wears a tanjak, a folded headcloth; the player a songkok.

Smoother steps

Characters used to snap from tile to tile with straight legs. Now the drawn body glides toward its tile with a damped follower, which rounds corners and eases every start and stop. The stride is tied to distance travelled, so feet never slide. Knees and elbows bend, hips sway, the torso twists against the hips, and turning speed no longer depends on the frame rate. Crabs and lizards got the same treatment.

A journal for quests

A Quests tab joined Pack, Skills, Craft and Gear. The tutorial became a named quest, Castaway's Training, with eight steps that tick off as you go and counters that update live. The next quest, Landfall at Kuala Besut, sits locked underneath it. A dot on the tab shows when something changed, and the chat log announces quests starting and finishing.

Testing the tab turned up a bug: Guru's dialogue box stayed on screen after you closed it. Fixed in the same version.

A place to tell the story

This page. The screenshots on it are taken from the real build in a headless browser, the map is a simplified outline of the peninsula drawn in code, and the journal grows with every version.

Landfall at Kuala Besut

The roadmap already said what came next, so that was the brief. The boat from the end of the tutorial now sails: the view fades to night sea, a small perahu crosses a dotted line, and you tie up at the end of a jetty in Kuala Besut, where the Besut river meets the sea.

The town is a second map: a beach, a river lined with painted east-coast fishing boats, a bridge, stilt houses, a mosque with the tiered roof of old Terengganu mosques, and a fish market. Two people live there. Encik Rahman is the harbourmaster, a post once called syahbandar. Kak Yah runs the sundry shop.

Coins came with her: ringgit, earned by selling what you catch and cut. The garment slots from v5 finally paid off. A terendak (straw hat), a baju Melayu, a kain pelikat (checked sarong) and capal (sandals) each change how the character looks the moment you put them on. The river has giant prawns, the end of the jetty has tuna for anyone with Fishing 12, a charcoal grill cooks them, and macaques in the forest drop coins they stole from someone.

Underneath, the world was rebuilt as zones so the game can hold more than one map, and saves from v7 carry straight over. The mainland needed land past the edge of the map so it would not end in a cliff, and at first that drew 317,000 triangles a frame. Merging the scenery into chunks the camera can skip brought it down to about 37,000 at the jetty.

A headless playthrough of the new quest, fifteen checks from boarding the boat to sailing home, caught two things before anyone saw them: the fish market had been built half in the sea, and the jetty sign read backwards from the boat.