ALTERNATIVES TO TOWNS

One alternative I like is to have one well developed town instead of multiple ones. See Majora's Mask and Minish Cap of the Zelda series. This of course will only work is the story doesn't require the hero to travel to different towns.

Other than that, I'm not really fond of alternatives. I want to actually see people in order to feel that they are there. It's part of the "show, don't tell" formula, you have to actually show me the people. Of course, if there aren't really many other people than the party members, then you can safely skip the towns.

I generally prefer more realistic towns, even in fantasy games. What that means is that making a typical-sized rpg town just doesn't work for me. Who ever heard of a town with eight buildings in it? Towns have thousands of people. I want the game to really make me feel like that's the kind of place I'm in, not tell me I'm in the biggest city in the world but then show me an outpost the size of a small shopping center.

So where other games might have towns, I have individual buildings. I have a map for the hero's house; when you get to the end of his yard, you go to the area selection map. I have a map for the courthouse, and a map for the detective agency, and a map for the docks. These all serve as friendly places your party finds themselves at between dungeons, the same function as a town in a Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest game.

But what about a place to heal and shop? Well, you can have that too; it doesn't have to be at the same place, though. Perhaps the area selection map has three locations: an inn, a weapon shop, and the building where the cut scenes take place. Or perhaps just going into the friendly area heals you, and you can find a guy selling stuff standing around somewhere inside. Or perhaps you can access a shop from the menu, any time you're in a friendly area.

I've also seen a lot of games just replace the entire concept of towns with a menu screen in between each level. From the menu you can spend points to upgrade your characters, accept missions, buy things, and maybe heal if that's not done automatically. And then choose "Done" to proceed to the next level. Dungeon crawlers, tactical rpgs, and action games all do this very commonly. I feel like this speeds up the process for the player, and is a nice way to keep the pace of your game moving. It works well in a lot of games, and would actually work near-perfectly in, say, FF4, where each of the towns only has one cut scene at most, which you could simply show automatically at the end of the previous level. But it wouldn't work so great in a game like FF7, where the story depends heavily on all the cut scenes and exploration within towns.

author=LockeZ
I generally prefer more realistic towns, even in fantasy games. What that means is that making a typical-sized rpg town just doesn't work for me. Who ever heard of a town with eight buildings in it? Towns have thousands of people.

Well technically a medieval-like town would probably only house a couple of hundred at most. A big city might house thousands.

And then there are villages and they often do consist of eight buildings.

author=Shinan
Well technically a medieval-like town would probably only house a couple of hundred at most. A big city might house thousands.

And then there are villages and they often do consist of eight buildings.

So apparently not only are you right, but also, there are hamlets with only five or six houses that still exist in modern-day Romania. Having been to Romania, the fact that parts of it are still stuck in the 1400s doesn't really surprise me.

I don't really think that's the kind of place your heroes are supposed to be visiting, though, when they visit a town that's depicted as having only a few buildings. It's almost always treated as a major location or an important stop. Occasionally you do find a small group of hermits living in a wilderness settlement, and I guess an eight-building town is fine if that's what you're going for. But to have Narshe and Nibelheim that size is ridiculous. And I get that it comes as a result of tradition and minimalism, and I get why people do it, but if you're looking for alternatives to traditional towns this is absolutely my first piece of advice: make bigger towns, big enough that the player could not possibly expect you to map the entire town, and then use that as an excuse to only map one or two buildings.

In other news, one of the games I made a lot of maps for was set entirely in a hellish prison dimension. So one of the "towns" consists of a tarp held up by poles with two people camping under it, and another "town" is a guy in a small barricaded room in a cave, and another "town" is a group of warriors who have cleared out the first room of a temple full of monsters. And the people in these odd locations will sell you potions and weapons and let you sleep if you talk to them, so they absolutely function as normal towns from a gameplay standpoint, but they do not at all give off the feeling of being in a safe haven.

author=GreatRedSpirit
More seriously, something I've tried in the past was making towns with an open roof aesthetic. Instead of making a town out of buildings and a separate map for their interiors I put the interior right inside the building on the town map. It skips making a new map for interiors and keeps house sizes down while also contributing to a unique feel for your game. Of course it also adds restrictions like multifloor buildings and bypassing those will take far more time than the style saved.

Can multi-level buildings on a single map not yet be done on an RPG Maker? I know that the number of layers you have is limiting, but could you possibly skirt around this with events?

It would be nice to walk into a house and see the second floor and roof tear away (or more rightly put, to see it go away), and then, to head upstairs and see the second floor appear and cover the first.

From a design/art perspective, though, if you could do that, the areas outside of the house would distract. Unless you could put some kind of filter over it to blur them out once you zoned in -- like a boca photography effect.

I don't get to play around with my copy of Ace enough to know if it would be possible to add these types of things in or not. It would be a breath of fresh air, though.

author=LockeZ
I generally prefer more realistic towns, even in fantasy games. What that means is that making a typical-sized rpg town just doesn't work for me. Who ever heard of a town with eight buildings in it? Towns have thousands of people. I want the game to really make me feel like that's the kind of place I'm in, not tell me I'm in the biggest city in the world but then show me an outpost the size of a small shopping center.

A lot of the Playstation-era Final Fantasies were good about making cities appear large. FFIX jumps out at me right away when I think about this. But then again, they're kind of a different beast. I think you could still corral a player into a smaller area of a city while still making the city feel large, though.

Tales of the Abyss had an interesting take on the towns. When a city was huge, most of the residential area was blocked off and just seen in the background. You could never actually go there. This way, the developer didn't have to spend too long working on towns, but you never get the sense you get in a lot of games that only ten people live in each town and only five have beds.

I think the question any game developer needs to ask him/herself is "What do my towns do?"

Are they a central hub where the player buys/sells stuff, is it a place for healing, getting quests and what-not? Or is it purely for cutscenes and exposition? Are the towns dungeons themselves? Is there anything worthwhile inside people's homes, extra shops and other places?

After establishing what purpose the town serves, THEN you start laying out a foundation for the map. Don't have anything interesting in the homes except an NPC saying "Hey"? Don't map it. Make locked doors. Make rooms and areas inaccessible. There are always places in a town that aren't accessible to everyone. Bars aren't going to let minors in and people generally lock their doors when they leave home (and usually when they are home too).

Another alternative to mapping towns is to make everything menu based. Select where you want to go, have some sort of background but not an actual map. This can be seen in the Etrian Odyssey series.

The point is, there are so many things to consider when looking at towns but expansive, explorable maps DO NOT always have to go in every game.

Well if all you do is just make a town for the sake of being a town, then yes it'll be a drag, but you can always think a little more and make them a bit more themed. So not only is there variety in the towns, but I imagine they become easier and less of a bore to develop. For example you could have towns that,

-Are a ranch town, lots of livestock, not a lot of people/buildings.
-Developed in part of a cliff, so buildings are made of rock that's been hollowed out.
-A nomad village, small huts and small in general, with the idea that they move around a lot most of the time.
-A village separated by islands.
-A village with it's own instant travel to various points.

Just as a few ideas, but I figure if the town has a bit more individuality then it'd probably be less boring to create as opposed to just "Add X number of buildings, include W,Y,Z shops, place in NPC's, script non-important and pointless dialog".

You could just try the FFTactics route and have the towns just be a hub for buying items, resting. Maybe just make some interiors to have special cutscenes, etc taking place.