HOW THE HECK DO YOU DESIGN A TOWN?

author=Craze
"forest town" "mountain town" "WOW OBSERVATORY CITY HOLY SHIT" "forest town" "snow town" is like. why. why bother. talk to all the NPCs you like, wouldn't you rather visit "the forest town full of elves and humans that are dealing with racism and have split the town into two halves," "the mountain town where a mine recently collapsed and when you arrive there is a mass funeral going on, and if you do a sidequest in that mine you can save some 16yo laborer and brighten the town's hopes," "WOW OBSERVATORY CITY HOLY SHIT," "the forest town where all the buildings are in the trees, because the ground level has random encounters against direwolves unless you ask one of the elf shamans to guide you through a special warded path," and "the snowy town where three separate religions have moderately large places of worship, and the town government works hard to ensure peace among all the various believers... except right now voting is going on and a radical looks like he might be elected to office, threatening the peace"

idk "have dull things to make your special areas cooler" strikes me as dumb and lazy. i want to be engaged in a game not go "ugh time to endure another terrible town.mp3"

A town doesn't have to be dramatically constructed to give something to engage the player. Take the three examples LockeZ gave from Final Fantasy VII which failed to be constructed around an interesting centerpiece, Kalm, Gongaga, and North Corel. Kalm is just a waypoint which the player doesn't need to actually explore, but most of the time you're there is spent in a flashback where Cloud explains his history with Sephiroth. Gongaga (which is an interlude the player can skip entirely,) offers a hook for one of the game's central twists; Tifa is hiding something from Cloud, and it has something to do with his history with SOLDIER. It's also built on the outskirts of an exploded mako reactor which devastated the town, to which Shinra responded by providing no assistance whatsoever, making it a significant figure in the history of the setting, and building up the character of the antagonists. North Corel highlights the devastation caused by Shinra, and reveals Barret's backstory and motivations for starting AVALANCHE. The people there are ground down and dispirited, but they all hate Barret at least as much as they hate Shinra, for his role as an instigator.

There's a difference between "Build your town around an attention-grabbing centerpiece" and "Make your town offer something interesting to give it a life of its own and make it more than a punctuation mark on the heroes' journey."

Even a town which doesn't engage the player characters in adventurous activities can still offer things to explore which help give the setting character. Some examples off the top of my head for what you might include in a "mundane" town.

*Some starcrossed lovers who have a romantic subplot the player can follow (starcrossed lovers might see a lot of use, but it only takes a little creativity to put an original spin on them, and there are countless ways to resolve the plot. I'll be a cynical bastard and say these ones get a resolution where they drop everything to be together, only to end up miserable because their adolescent infatuation quickly sputters out in the face of dire material hardships, and they've burned their bridges too thoroughly to take anything back.)
*A family who believe that their son has died in action in the ongoing war. They're saddened by the loss, but take solace in the knowledge that their son died as a hero to his country. Later on, you can meet the son, living as a deserter, who'll tell you about the horrors his division went through, how their superior officer abused them and treated them as cannon fodder, until he was killed by his own men and the division scattered.
*An elf/human couple who enjoy an idyllic marriage and inadvertently inspire the starcrossed lovers in their decision to elope. The mixed couple is distressed by their own part in the affair, because they would never have advised that course of action, having themselves spent several years winning over the approval of their own families.
*A child who has a penpal in a distant locale. They trade stories about the events of their hometowns back and forth. With a little bit of help, they might be able to finally meet in person.
*A dude with a pet bear. He tries to keep it secret from his neighbors, but how secret can you keep a pet bear, really?
*A man who's hiding his dire financial situation from the rest of his family. While the rest of them are convinced everything is golden, he's plotting to burn their own house down for the insurance money.

Every town can have at least this much stuff going on. If it seems like too much work to put interesting things (and if you don't think these ideas sound interesting, feel free to substitute your own) into a town, then you should probably be aiming for a smaller number of towns. The ground state of human beings is to have a lot of stuff going on in their lives. Whether every location needs a major visual impact is a separate issue.

author=Isrieri

author=Desertopa
A town doesn't have to be dramatically constructed to give something to engage the player. Take the three examples LockeZ gave from Final Fantasy VII which failed to be constructed around an interesting centerpiece, Kalm, Gongaga, and North Corel. Kalm is just a waypoint which the player doesn't need to actually explore, but most of the time you're there is spent in a flashback where Cloud explains his history with Sephiroth. Gongaga (which is an interlude the player can skip entirely,) offers a hook for one of the game's central twists;

I don't see how that's an exception to what Craze is talking about. Those towns do have a memorable feature then: The purpose of their construction is to be the place where you get more of Clouds backstory or whatever. But just because they're offshoot villages that aren't necessarily important or even optional to visit doesn't mean that you can't or shouldn't try to make them dynamic. From my experience with I and IV Final Fantasy tends to drop important cutscences that revolve around the characters in the towns, but fail to make the towns themselves interesting (VI was an exception rather than the rule). You just stop by, do what you have to do, and then you drop out and may never return (or want to return). There's no reason to stick around and talk to anyone or go exploring except for hidden goodies I guess. VI was different because it did the very things Craze and LockeZ are talking about.

I never said, nor did I mean to imply, that towns shouldn't have memorable features. The only thing I was disputing was that LockeZ's suggestion of constructing towns around visible set pieces should be followed in every instance. That's a matter of visual aesthetics, not of how much plot or character significance or interesting content the towns have.

Craze was the one who took issue with my comments, not I with his, although I think the meaning he's reading into them is not what I intended them to convey. If I were to take his statements literally, I'd definitely disagree that "towns are the bane of RPGs," but I don't get the impression that he actually means that towns are necessarily bad (if I'm wrong, of course, he's free to correct me,) they're just done badly with such frequency that they're not usually a credible source of entertainment.

Usually, when game designers get it into their heads to "reward exploration" in towns, they scatter around items for the player to find and/or add NPCs who say things which suggest some kind of life beyond the activities of the player character. But if the NPCs say things which suggest they've got matters of their own to deal with, and those matters are a lot less interesting than the basic plot progression of the game, then talking to them isn't going to be very rewarding. And inspecting every goddamn identical barrel in town to see which ones are hiding permanent stat-boosting apples, or elixirs, or pieces of armor, or whatever the hell people put in barrels in your game, is a chore, plain and simple. Presenting tokens in exchange for the work the player puts into looking at and talking to everything might feel like a way to "reward exploration," but it's not a likely consequence of trying to make towns as fun and interesting as possible.

I didn't notice (or perhaps forgot) that bit, so I guess I was mistaken regarding his position. But with respect to this

Towns in FF7 that didn't really do anything wrong but just totally failed to be interesting include Sector 5 Slums, Kalm, Gongaga, and probably North Corel. (Icicle Inn almost qualifies too, right up until you escape the town via a snowboarding minigame.) None of them are too big or hard to navigate or anything, they're just boring and forgettable. All of these towns basically just relied on the equivalent of using different tilesets from each-other to try to be interesting. And that was enough to make them not feel identical, but it wasn't enough to make them matter.

I felt that all of those locations did an effective job with respect to their roles in the story. To the extent that Kalm, for instance, "matters" in the story, it's essentially due to its role as neutral space. Giving it a more distinct flavor and presence of its own wouldn't really have assisted with that.

So Kalm's role was to not matter, and thus making it less boring wouldn't have helped its role? I'm not buying it. Why do you specifically need a town that doesn't matter?

If anything FF7 could have probably benefitted from just having fewer towns, rather than making its towns more interesting. This is probably true of a lot of other games too. Cut the cruft.

I mean, you're right about why Kalm matters: its only role in the story is to provide a stark contrast to Midgar, being a mostly prosperous town where only a few of the townspeople hate Shinra instead of all of them.

But look at how it fills that role. Everything that happens "in Kalm" actually happens in a flashback in Nibelheim, so to me it's like, shit, that flashback could happen literally anywhere, why do we need a whole town dedicated to it? And the moment the flashback starts you see a very clear picture of a town where Shinra is bringing prosperity rather than squalor; why do you need that outside of the flashback too? Plus you still have Upper Junon, Gold Saucer, Icicle Inn, and Costa del Sol doing the same thing. It's very redundant and pointless.

I would have combined Kalm and the Chocobo Ranch into one location, called the Chocobo Ranch.

Edit: sorry about the two blank posts above, just ignore them. My computer borked while I was trying to edit my post and I ended up posting it repeatedly.

author=LockeZ
So Kalm's role was to not matter, and thus making it less boring wouldn't have helped its role? I'm not buying it. Why do you specifically need a town that doesn't matter?

If anything FF7 could have probably benefitted from just having fewer towns, rather than making its towns more interesting. This is probably true of a lot of other games too. Cut the cruft.

I mean, you're right about why Kalm matters: its only role in the story is to provide a stark contrast to Midgar, being a mostly prosperous town where only a few of the townspeople hate Shinra instead of all of them.

But look at how it fills that role. Everything that happens "in Kalm" actually happens in a flashback in Nibelheim, so to me it's like, shit, that flashback could happen literally anywhere, why do we need a whole town dedicated to it? And the moment the flashback starts you see a very clear picture of a town where Shinra is bringing prosperity rather than squalor; why do you need that outside of the flashback too? Plus you still have Upper Junon, Gold Saucer, Icicle Inn, and Costa del Sol doing the same thing. It's very redundant and pointless.

I would have combined Kalm and the Chocobo Ranch into one location, called the Chocobo Ranch.

The flashback could theoretically happen just about anywhere. They could have crunched it in before leaving Midgar, but since they're wanted men there, hiding out inside the city ramps the tension up too high. They could have it out in the middle of nowhere, on a field or something, but it kind of lacks realism for the characters to stand out in the middle of nowhere having this long discussion instead of relocating somewhere more comfortable. And they could have had it on the Chocobo Ranch, but I think having the discussion on a dinky little farm full of strutting yellow birds robs it of some of its gravity.

I think it probably would have been better if Kalm and the Chocobo Ranch had been merged, but instead of having an inexplicable ranch out in the middle of nowhere serving god only knows what customers, I'd stick the Chocobo Ranch in the town, right on the outskirts. This way the flashback setting keeps the right level of tension, while the town is made more interesting, and the chocobo ranch makes more sense since it's not stranded in the middle of nowhere (one thing we haven't really discussed so far in this topic is making the geographical context of the locations work for them, but this is an area where Final Fantasy VII, like most RPGs, doesn't put in much effort.)

author=Sooz
Thinking about this subject, I'm reminded of a rule of thumb for writing: If you're having eternal writer's block over a scene, that is probably a sign you don't need it.

I think the same can be applied to this subject. Do you really need a town? Sure, you need a place for the characters to rest, heal, get stuff. But does it need to be a town, rather than a clearing with a peddler and a campsite? Is there a purpose served by having the characters visit a permanent settlement instead of anything else?

Basically, instead of thinking that you need to put a town in because this is the part where towns go, think of what the true purpose of your "town" is, and whether that can be better served with something simpler.

I agree that it's better to avoid making boring towns. I think Kalm, to continue with an example, served its purpose well in adjusting the tension of the narrative to an appropriate level for that point in the story, but it could certainly have been given more content of interest. But honestly... I really don't like random campsites with peddlers. They just bug me, a lot, because I feel like the game is saying "I have no excuse for putting a town here, but it would be a pain if you couldn't rest or buy stuff, so here, have a pit stop." It does a number on my feeling of immersion. I'm sure that players who dislike them as much as I do are seriously in the minority, but if it were me, rather than going the "campsite and peddler" route, I would go out of my way to ensure that the situation where the player was in need of supplies and an inn while separated from any plot-justified place of human habitation simply wouldn't arise in the first place. Failing that, I'd make it, I dunno, a band of deserted soldiers roughing it in the wilderness because they'll face charges of treason if they make it back to civilization, or a secret polygamist hippie commune, or some other thing which has enough character of its own to make it seem like something other than a basic gameplay contrivance.

To add another fundamental component, I think the critical objective should be furthest from the entrance. Not literally true, but the town should be structured such that the relevant data and material should be naturally acquired by the time you reach the critical objective. Dragon Quest games usually do this by making the critical objective the king, in a castle situsted just beyond the town's critical path which contains shops, inns, a church, and NPCs that set you up with the current scenario climate.

o

author=LockeZ
Here's one problem I've encountered with trying to make towns:
- There's a set of buildings you absolutely need in every town. An inn, an item shop, 2-3 equipment shops, and possibly other things depending on your game. So you start by plopping these down.

I'm not really sure why town services require a specific building in the town -- realistically, you could get away just fine with a single character (presumably a party member or non-combat hanger-on type) who meets you at the town entrance and does your shopping for you (i.e., you can buy and sell with them and then there's a quick fade-out-fade-in while they go off and do your shopping for you).

You could even have the player just buy and sell through the menu. For a more realistic take on that, have them use the menu to create a 'shopping list' which they automatically work through offscreen when you next enter a town.