MINIMIZING MAPPING: AN ABSTRACT EXERCISE IN GAME DESIGN

Realtalk tho I feel like if you're really not into mapping, maybe it's a sign that you should try making some other form of game.

If you absolutely need to stick with RPG style because you're being held captive by a madman with a gun and a desire for an RPG, I guess you could do a setup like Give Up, with only one map whose elements change as the game progresses.

I'm not sure if a few very interesting maps are of less work to make than a lot of less interesting ones though.

Anyway, I did enjoy revisiting worlds in Kingdom Hearts to gather anything I couldn't get before, but I did not enjoy the second mandatory run-trough of Hollow Bastion. This is also my general experience, voluntary backtracking can be fun, but mandatory rarely is.

Having single rooms or hub locations that you revisits frequently can work well. For example, there's the forest temple in Zelda: Ocarina of Time where ghosts steal four flames, which you then have to recover from their cold dead ectoplasm. You will most likely visit that room frequently. A single town that you visit between every dungeon dive is another example. However, backtracking trough long stretches of rooms and hallways is not fun.

It could just be my taste, but I don't think so. This fits what I commonly see people complaining about in various gaming related forums.

If you want to design an RPG where people have to backtrack a lot, my suggestion would be to structure it so that the player has a lot of control over when and where to backtrack. Let's say the player is chasing various leads. One lead points towards a place the player has already been to, but even though the player eventually has to backtrack, she/he can choose to instead go after another lead and put the first lead on hold for quite a long time.

author=Crystalgate
This is also my general experience, voluntary backtracking can be fun, but mandatory rarely is.

Voluntary backtracking either feels like you wasted your time, but it's your fault, or feels like you're being rewarded for remembering layout/landmarks and spending the time to revisit places once you get new abilities.

Mandatory backtracking will come off as creator laziness to players unless a lot of work is put in. Though I'm not including situations in that statement where, for example, you explore a town once normally, then once after it's been razed, since those are clearly different maps.

If you want to design an RPG where people have to backtrack a lot, my suggestion would be to structure it so that the player has a lot of control over when and where to backtrack. Let's say the player is chasing various leads. One lead points towards a place the player has already been to, but even though the player eventually has to backtrack, she/he can choose to instead go after another lead and put the first lead on hold for quite a long time.

Reminds me of games like Elder Scrolls and Fallout. Fast travel really cuts down on the sense of tedium. Or in my case, getting side tracked because look, a cave! It might have TREASURE!

I never finish Fallout or Elder Scrolls games. Too much shiny, not enough time.

author=LockeZ
Compare, say, travelling through 1000 AD in Chrono Trigger. You end up passing through the Millenial Fair, Truce Village and Guardia Forest a second time after returning from 600 AD a couple hours into the game. They could've skipped this with some guards arresting you right at the time gate, or Marle could've told you about a new shortcut that bypassed all the areas you had been through before, but instead the game let you make your own way through the familiar areas; this helps you see a world in your head instead of just a series of paths. Later in the game you arrive through a whirlpool and it connects to Lucca's house, where you've been before, instead of to a brand new location, and travel from there to the Millenial Fair a third time - this helps connect the whirlpool path to the world you've already build up in your head. There was no real need for any of this, the game could've just added a time gate leading to 600 AD at the end of Heckran's Cave - but they decided, very accurately, that it was more important to connect the player back to the world they know for a brief time and remind them how everything fits together.

This topic is about Minimizing Mapping and your examples of backtracking in CT doesn't accomplish that. If anything, that made mapping take longer since the mappers had to think about how everything connects.

When I wrote about backtracking, it's in the context of trying to cut down the mapping you have to do since that's what the topic is about. If you employ backtracking as means to cut down on mapping, then by necessity you're having the player go trough an area a second time when other games would have made new areas for the player instead.

I think backtracking can be accomplished well, particularly in a time travel or, say, dimension-shifting setup (I'm thinking of games like LoZ:aLttP and the Silent Hill series here) where maps are similar but not exactly the same: you could make a few large, sprawling maps, slightly alter them for each time period/dimension, and have big areas that are only accessible by backtracking under certain conditions.

(As an aside, I'm not sure whether this would strictly count as "backtracking," rather than a modified hub setup, the way I'm visualizing it, but either way, it'd involve a lot of back and forth in the same areas.)

The biggest challenge there would be to balance things so that it doesn't feel like a chore to go over the previously-visited bits. Something like Earthbound's mechanic of auto-win battles at a certain level, or maybe one of enemies fleeing when you're powerful enough, would help in this case, as would no encounters (though I have a feeling the OP would not be so into that option XD )

Might also be neat to have small aesthetic changes in previously-visited areas as you progress in-game; I know I would personally find it rewarding to backtrack just to see how things have changed, especially if they're a result of my actions in the game. :3

If the areas or even just the NPCs change slightly, you can do a lot.
The Sunken Spire had quite the town progress - there was just one, but I loved spending time there and a lot of dialogue and NPCs were added over time.
You got background events as addition to the plot-line there, could talk to rescued NPCs and so on.

While you cannot build on the exploration aspect along, it is a great feeling to see areas grow, develop and change.
Gothic used backtracking fairly often due to the town system, but it never got old. (+ seeing the "old" areas of the first in the second game was an amazingly wonderful feeling)

In putting forward my own thoughts on this I'm probably going to repeat what others have said or otherwise state the obvious, so my apologies for that.

When I think of minimal map design, I think we can learn a lot from point and click adventure games, many of which take place within a handful of locations per chapter and have you revisiting them as plot or puzzle progression happens. Backtracking needn't be a bad thing. If you design your areas, and your reasons for revisiting them, to be compelling, I don't think people will complain too much.

Of course, this doesn't necessarily mean less work. If you have a lot of "just passing through" maps you can probably get away with not spending too much time on them, but if your game is heavily reliant on a few areas you really should be making sure they're well-planned and interesting.

There should be things to look at and interact with that give the location presence and character. The areas should evolve as you visit them, with character dialogue changing. More importantly, players should feel like they're progressing significantly, not just performing mundane fetch quests. Unless you're very good at designing multi-part puzzles or quests, this probably works best for a story-driven game.

But you don't just have to make fewer maps. Making them smaller is an option too. Do you really need to map out a whole town if only a few locations are important? Do you really need to map out a whole house if only a couple of rooms are used? There are benefits to doing so, sure, but sometimes taking a narrower focus on your locations can really help to make them compelling. Leaving things to the imagination isn't a bad thing.

Or instead of cutting an area down, you can instead use that narrower focus to expand on it - to give the house a bunch of individual rooms, some grounds, maybe a neighbour that factors in somehow.

If you're worried that showing less of your world makes it less fleshed-out, maybe you can just do a "cutscene" map, like a single street of the town meant to be panned over, rather than interacted with by the player.

If, instead, you're concerned with fitting in all the traditional RPG trappings - Inn, Armour Shop, etc - you could just as easily make them important locations in their own right. The character has to stay at the inn for story purposes, and not just to regain HP - this can help make you feel like you're inhabiting a town and not just passing through. One of the principal characters could live in the armour shop, or the armourer could be a suspect in some kind of plot. Again, this is assuming a heavily story-driven game, but I'm sure these concepts can be adapted for other types of games too.

author=Max McGee
Word. I'd really like to make or play a game where the central area is a spaceship and you basically go on little space missions to different places. Kind of a Star Trek vibe, that'd be really cool.

Here's a pretty good RPG Maker game a bit like that: SYMA.

This gives me food for thought. I've wanted to make a game like that for a long time, but somewhere along the line I got all focused on designing worlds and planets and cultures and forgot the simple fact that the ship you're based from should be compelling as well, not just a means to an end. Thank you very much for the reminder.

What if the entire game takes place in a single location? Say you're a king sitting on your throne, and the entire game consists of interacting with advisors, subjects, etc. This could be adapted to being a president or mayor in the modern world, a commander of a space ship, or even a pirate captain.

The thing is, the less maps you have, the more writing you will have to do. Content is content.