HOW THE HECK DO YOU DESIGN A TOWN?

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author=Desertopa
Reminds me of a bit from this Final Fantasy XII review.

The rumours are indeed true and Vaan is the least plot-important playable character. So far that's established. However, Vaan fills a vital role in the party that I can't remember any other character in any Final Fantasy I've played (i.e. 1-10) filling so obviously. Vaan is the official party bitch.

I can just imagine a usual party meeting in the back room of a Rabanastre tavern:

Basch: Vayne gathers his forces. We must hurry and find a way to stop him, else all is lost.

Ashe: Let us leave at once for the mystical temple and seek the mystical stone.

Balthier: Good thinking, but we should go along the coast. The empire's troops won't be looking for us there.

Vaan: Coast? We're going to the beach? Awesome, I'm packing my swimming trunks!

Silence.

Balthier: Vaan. Vaan, why don't you go out and buy us a few new suits of armour? A few hundred potions and remedies, too. Be so kind, would you? Oh, and pick up my shirts from the laundromat while you're out, there's a dear.

At which point you, the player, take over and guide Vaan through an exciting city adventure full of calculating prizes and haggling with merchants. This is the reason you only ever play as Vaan inside cities.



Oh....Oh God...My sides...My sides they hurt so bad...

*continues laughing his ass off*
author=Desertopa
Personally, I think that divorcing towns from the whole "buying new weapons, armor, and items" deal could be a good idea, since absent the obvious mechanical excuse, the game designer is practically forced to find something more interesting to do with the towns.


As Liberty said, this leaves towns with the default function of being a safe area to explore, and also providing colour and texture to the world. Not every cake baked in the game has to be a cake of lesser healing or a cake of plot advancement, and the same principle can apply to towns.
LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
I could find something more interesting to do with the towns, sure, but then it would become a game that's largely about whatever you're doing in the towns. The kind of game that I want to make, and that most non-sandbox RPG designers want to make, is a game about fighting, planning out strategies for fighting, preparing your characters for fighting, and strengthening your party by fighting. I don't want to make a game about fighting, trailing people to eavesdrop and pickpocket them, training as a blacksmith's apprentice, and managing the finances for an item shop that's in extreme debt. Nothing wrong with making a game about those things; I just don't want to. I'm not making an AAA game or emulating their style, so including a bunch of other game modes that offer different styles of gameplay isn't in my plans.

I just want a place for buying new weapons, armor, and items. It doesn't have to be a town. But if a non-combat area doesn't fulfill that role, then the only other role I have for it to fulfill is a cut scene.

I will say that I'm not sure why "non-combat area" and "town" seem to be interchangable, since the JRPG style of towns doesn't make a lot of sense to me. It seems to me that most of your dungeons should be buildings or districts in towns and cities, in most games. That's where most of your plot happens, after all. That's where both your heroes and your villains operate from. If you're making a game about exploring uncharted wilderness planets, or escaping a hellish prison dimension, then it makes sense, but I can't come up with a compelling reason why there's more than one or two dungeons outside of a town in Final Fantasy 6 or Suikoden 2 or basically any other game set in a civilized society.

When Figaro Castle sank into the sand, instead of the nation's royal castle being surrounded by endless uninhabited desert and the party riding off to some random caves, it should be been surrounded by the desert city of North Figaro and the party escaped through the city's back alleys. I mean seriously. That's how you work your cities into the gameplay in a video game. You just make your game happen in cities.
author=LockeZ
The kind of game that I want to make, and that most non-sandbox RPG designers want to make, is a game about fighting, planning out strategies for fighting, preparing your characters for fighting, and strengthening your party by fighting.


That might be the kind of game you want to make, but I don't think this is true of most other designers, except maybe by extremely narrow definitions of non-sandbox.

I appreciate good combat in games, but if I had to choose one or the other between a game with extensive thought and effort put into the combat, or a game with extensive effort put into the story and characterization, I'd definitely pick the latter, either as a player or as a designer.

author=LockeZ
I will say that I'm not sure why "non-combat area" and "town" seem to be interchangable, since the JRPG style of towns doesn't make a lot of sense to me. It seems to me that most of your dungeons should be buildings or districts in towns and cities, in most games. That's where most of your plot happens, after all. That's where both your heroes and your villains operate from. If you're making a game about exploring uncharted wilderness planets, or escaping a hellish prison dimension, then it makes sense, but I can't come up with a compelling reason why there's more than one or two dungeons outside of a town in Final Fantasy 6 or Suikoden 2 or basically any other game set in a civilized society.


I think Earthbound handled this pretty well. A significant portion of the action might be in places other than cities (although this makes sense considering that Ness's "sanctuary" locations are usually some manner of wilderness,) but rather than being breaks from the action where you can stock up and prepare, they usually contain most of the action for whatever part of the story they're associated with.

The tendency to pit RPG heroes mostly against wildernesses or ancient ruins or whatever rather than cities full of people I think has a lot to do with unexamined convention, but I think for a lot of game designers, there's an element of convenience involved. That is, they don't want the audience to think about the protagonists as some kind of mass murderers, so they minimize the amount of conflict that pits them directly against other human beings.
Sooz
They told me I was mad when I said I was going to create a spidertable. Who’s laughing now!!!
5354
author=Desertopa
That might be the kind of game you want to make, but I don't think this is true of most other designers, except maybe by extremely narrow definitions of non-sandbox.

I appreciate good combat in games, but if I had to choose one or the other between a game with extensive thought and effort put into the combat, or a game with extensive effort put into the story and characterization, I'd definitely pick the latter, either as a player or as a designer.


I don't really think that's what was being said; the point as I read it was more about the role of a town, and didn't have anything whatsoever to do with character or story. Streamlining a game's design to focus fully on the intended gameplay doesn't mean tossing aside any sort of writing. (And I'd venture that story and characterization can happen ANYWHERE, and shouldn't be confined to towns or non-combat areas.)
LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
Yeah, part of what I was saying was just "There's got to be a way to include towns in the gameplay when someone wants to make a game like this, which is at least some of the time."

But the other part was "Almost none of the Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, or Suikoden games do anything extra in towns that's interesting enough to take the place of upgrading my characters. Triple Triad and Tetra Master, the card games in FF8 and FF9, are the only examples that were good enough to really fully take over. And most people don't want to create an entire second game that takes place in towns like what you get from Triple Triad. It creates a very different kind of RPG. One that's largely about the minigame."

I wasn't saying anything about story and I'm not sure where you even got that from...? I was just trying to say that if you add a different type of gameplay, you end up with a different type of game.
Consider what a town is.

It is either:

1. A meeting place for local hamlet dwellers with a legal market
2. A roadside dwelling offering services to passing travelers
3. An amalgamation of existing small dwellings

Use that as a basis to design your town.

In option 1, you will have a market place as the centre. There will probably be services for that market place: a tavern, etc. Some sort of authority, maybe large enough for a town hall (but probably not).

In option 2 your town will be linear (unless it's a crossroads) with most shops facing the road. Dwellings will be down alleyways off this, so as to maximise the frontage space.

In option 3 you just have a clusterfuck of buildings with no real centre. It's bad town planning, and you'll end up with a bad town, but one designed to be badly designed, if that makes sense.
author=LockeZ
I wasn't saying anything about story and I'm not sure where you even got that from...? I was just trying to say that if you add a different type of gameplay, you end up with a different type of game.


I was responding to

author=LockeZ
The kind of game that I want to make, and that most non-sandbox RPG designers want to make, is a game about fighting, planning out strategies for fighting, preparing your characters for fighting, and strengthening your party by fighting.


If that's the kind of game you want to make, then by all means the towns should be devised accordingly, if you feel you have a reason to include towns at all. I just don't think that it's accurate that this is the kind of game that "most non-sandbox RPG designers want to make." I gave myself as an example of someone for whom those sorts of gameplay concerns occupy a position of importance several rungs down from other elements of game design.

author=LockeZ
But the other part was "Almost none of the Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, or Suikoden games do anything extra in towns that's interesting enough to take the place of upgrading my characters. Triple Triad and Tetra Master, the card games in FF8 and FF9, are the only examples that were good enough to really fully take over. And most people don't want to create an entire second game that takes place in towns like what you get from Triple Triad. It creates a very different kind of RPG. One that's largely about the minigame."


Some of the games in these series have crappy towns, but the way I view the games, I wouldn't agree with the position that "almost none of them do anything interesting enough to take the place of upgrading the characters." To me, wandering around in a well devised town, interacting with people, exploring the setting and such is already much more interesting than something like upgrading characters by buying equipment and items, unless you have a really unusually genius party setup system. If I were forced to cut out either the option to upgrade your characters in towns in Final Fantasy VIII, including Triple Triad with all its gameplay advantages, or the ability to wander around talking to NPCs and picking up background information about the setting, I'd have more fun playing the version with the character upgrading including Triple Triad cut out. I'd prefer that the game have both, but as far as I'm concerned, stuff like wandering around Balamb Garden talking to people is just as much the point of the game as, say, clearing aliens off an abandoned spaceship.

Embric of Wulfhammer's Castle is an RPGMaker game which delivers the sort of thing I like to see in towns, if not necessarily in visual set design terms, then at least in terms of exploratory activity, and practically nothing else, for the entire game, and I found it extremely fun. Combat is practically nonexistent, so while you do get the opportunity to level up the main character and get her new, more powerful equipment, it's almost meaningless in gameplay terms, and functions more like trophies to remind the player of the fun things they did by which they got their hands on the equipment or experience points.

It's not that I can't enjoy a game where towns don't fill these functions. Final Fantasy Tactics, which reduces towns to a small menu of gameplay-relevant locations you can visit, is one of my favorite games of all time. But I care enough about these sorts of basic town functions that I think it's possible to make a very fun game by focusing on these elements and nothing else.

LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
You want towns to literally have no gameplay?

I don't agree. I'm not interested in making a game where you play an hour of RPG followed by half an hour of visual novel. If you remove the gameplay from towns, you need different gameplay to replace it. Otherwise they're just absurdly long, uninteresting, interactive cut scenes. Ain't nobody got time fo dat.
If nobody had time for that, Embric of Wulfhammer's Castle wouldn't appeal to so many players.

I wouldn't enjoy a game with absurdly long, uninteresting, interactive cutscenes, but the determinative factor there is "uninteresting."

I might have sunk an embarrassing number of hours into Triple Triad, but on the whole I found it addictive rather than actually fun. The fact that it incorporated more gameplay into towns made it more game-ey, but I did not find it more enjoyable.

Not that I think towns necessarily shouldn't contain gameplay, I just think that it's not necessary or necessarily helpful for making towns interesting.
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