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MAKING TOWNS AND CITIES APPEAR LARGER THAN THE PLAYER-VISITABLE AREAS
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dbz77
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dbz77
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CloseObviously,m it would be impractical to fully render an entire town even the size of Truckee, California (let alone big cities like London or Shanghai). Some games use tricks to make it seem there is more to a town or city than the area the player characters visit in game.
what other tricks are used?
- The town goes all the way to the edges of the town map, implying that the town extends far beyond the boundaries of the map, but the player characters for some reason do not visit those areas.
- Entering a city takes the characters to an overworld-style city map. Only the central business district and homes or headquarters of important NPC's are visitable. (SaGa Frontier ansd Xenogears do this.)
what other tricks are used?
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
If you just want the city to look busier, height differences help a lot. Things overlapping other things. They give the impression that the town is denser and that not everything in this set of 20x15 tiles on the screen right now is able to be shown. And people associate denseness with urban cities, so it works even if you're not using the height differences to hide anything. It'll still look like a tiny RPG town though.
As far as making it seem like the cities are realistically sized, I'm generally a fan of handling the travel the same way we handle travel in real life - when you leave your house you decide where to go and then transportation takes you there. This can be the player's car or horse, or public transit like a taxi or carriage, or it can be never shown and the player can imagine that the traveling is happening however they think makes sense. The game construct would look like a menu with a list of locations, or a map with dots/icons on it for each location, letting the player click on one. Depending on how much atmosphere the exterior of the building adds you may want the menu to take the player to the end of the street leading to the building, or to the edge of the yard, or directly inside the building.
There aren't a lot of situations where it makes sense for the player to have any reason to wander aimlessly around a city, really. Unless you're making a game about surviving as a homeless person, both the character being portrayed and the player controlling them probably have zero interest in exploring the environment while walking past rows of buildings looking for the right one. I feel like nothing will be lost by skipping that part in a typical RPG or adventure game - any movie would certainly usually skip it, unless an event occurs along the way or the director wants it as background for a conversation.
As far as making it seem like the cities are realistically sized, I'm generally a fan of handling the travel the same way we handle travel in real life - when you leave your house you decide where to go and then transportation takes you there. This can be the player's car or horse, or public transit like a taxi or carriage, or it can be never shown and the player can imagine that the traveling is happening however they think makes sense. The game construct would look like a menu with a list of locations, or a map with dots/icons on it for each location, letting the player click on one. Depending on how much atmosphere the exterior of the building adds you may want the menu to take the player to the end of the street leading to the building, or to the edge of the yard, or directly inside the building.
There aren't a lot of situations where it makes sense for the player to have any reason to wander aimlessly around a city, really. Unless you're making a game about surviving as a homeless person, both the character being portrayed and the player controlling them probably have zero interest in exploring the environment while walking past rows of buildings looking for the right one. I feel like nothing will be lost by skipping that part in a typical RPG or adventure game - any movie would certainly usually skip it, unless an event occurs along the way or the director wants it as background for a conversation.
I'm sure I'm not the only one who doesn't like supposedly huge cities be confined to a few houses on a map. We understand as players we can't actually explore every inch of a city described to be the size of New York City, but we want at least the impression to back it up.
As a design goal, you want to design the actual areas to make it easier for the player to walk around and get to where they need to go. Making the player walk fucking forever to get anywhere to convey size is an amateur move. Thankfully there are a few tools that convincingly give the player an impression of a giant city without the inconvenience of it.
You've already covered two of them; the first one, giving the player the visual of houses and streets going far beyond what they can explore works fine. Giving large cities their own overworld works fine as well. LockeZ's suggestion of giving the player an option of public transportation works great as well, and used to good effect in say, the Imperial Capital in FFXII; we are led to believe that Archades is a massive city, and it certainly appears so, and considering the fact that the player requires taxis to get around (similar to most national capitals) to points of interest serves both as an avenue of convenience, and serves to give the player the feeling of "damn, this place is big".
But visuals help too! In the former example, Archades, there are several vantage points where the player can look around and see tons of things going on that they can't interact with, but signal to the player "yeah this place is ultra big and busy". I specifically remember a vantage point on top of a skyscraper where the player can observe an airship traffic jam amongst a massive collection of buildings. Neat stuff.
As a design goal, you want to design the actual areas to make it easier for the player to walk around and get to where they need to go. Making the player walk fucking forever to get anywhere to convey size is an amateur move. Thankfully there are a few tools that convincingly give the player an impression of a giant city without the inconvenience of it.
You've already covered two of them; the first one, giving the player the visual of houses and streets going far beyond what they can explore works fine. Giving large cities their own overworld works fine as well. LockeZ's suggestion of giving the player an option of public transportation works great as well, and used to good effect in say, the Imperial Capital in FFXII; we are led to believe that Archades is a massive city, and it certainly appears so, and considering the fact that the player requires taxis to get around (similar to most national capitals) to points of interest serves both as an avenue of convenience, and serves to give the player the feeling of "damn, this place is big".
But visuals help too! In the former example, Archades, there are several vantage points where the player can look around and see tons of things going on that they can't interact with, but signal to the player "yeah this place is ultra big and busy". I specifically remember a vantage point on top of a skyscraper where the player can observe an airship traffic jam amongst a massive collection of buildings. Neat stuff.
LightningLord2
230
Castelia City is portrayed as bustling and highly populated by spawning numerous non-obstructing NPCs travelling through the central roads. There's also some speech bubbles that appear on them as they pass you. The city also has skyscrapers that only let you visit certain arbitrarily numbered floors in them to portray how many floors you don't need to care about.
Of course, you do want to have quite a number of things that can be done inside the city to make it feel big - Celadon City doesn't really look all that big, but with the five floor market, the free Eevee, the Game Corner, three TMs for drinks, Team Rocket's hideout and the gym, it feels immense.
Of course, you do want to have quite a number of things that can be done inside the city to make it feel big - Celadon City doesn't really look all that big, but with the five floor market, the free Eevee, the Game Corner, three TMs for drinks, Team Rocket's hideout and the gym, it feels immense.
A lot of depth can be given via parallaxes, too!
London Hilly Suburbia
Even with traditional tilesets!
Don't underestimate the shadowtool, just don't!
A few more examples!
http://i.imgur.com/I9uCS8S.png
http://i.imgur.com/uk1hZU5.png
http://i.imgur.com/w4ZUCwC.png
London Hilly Suburbia
Even with traditional tilesets!
Don't underestimate the shadowtool, just don't!
A few more examples!
http://i.imgur.com/I9uCS8S.png
http://i.imgur.com/uk1hZU5.png
http://i.imgur.com/w4ZUCwC.png
There's a few ways that I use.
1 - Make separate maps for small areas and jump to them by choice commands. You only visit certain parts of the town so it makes sense there's more than just the few houses you visit and that one part with stores.
This town has 4 inside houses and this area with shops.
As with the above image, only visitable via choice commands. Touch the edge and you're given the choice between x houses to visit or going to the world map.
2 - A one-screen map that has the town but allows for outer-screen additions via blockages/edge details.
As you can see, there's more houses hinted at outside the walls, making it seem bigger than it actually is.
Again, outside the edges there's hint of more areas.
This map is all you see of this town. It has two shops, an inn and three houses you can enter. The rest you can't but it gives the illusion that there's more houses in other areas - both with visual prompts and verbal ones.
3 - A couple of smaller maps that are mapped in such a way as to give the feel of more outside what you can see, but only allow you access to those maps in question.
A 2-map town but the cut-off gives the illusion that there's more outside the viewing area that can't be seen, thus can't be visited.
The paths lead out of town but there's an expectation of more due to how it's mapped.
4 - A handful of maps which have a lot of built-up houses/areas you can't visit to give the feel of anonymous cityscape.
There are three houses you can visit on this map.
This place is for information gathering only. NPCs will talk to you but that's it.
5 - A mix of the above. AKA, make a big-ass city/town.
Welcome to Tontaria.
It's a city.
A rather large city.
As you can see, there are houses you cannot get in to.
There's also a few screens worth of area to explore.
It's pretty large.
1 - Make separate maps for small areas and jump to them by choice commands. You only visit certain parts of the town so it makes sense there's more than just the few houses you visit and that one part with stores.
This town has 4 inside houses and this area with shops.
As with the above image, only visitable via choice commands. Touch the edge and you're given the choice between x houses to visit or going to the world map.
2 - A one-screen map that has the town but allows for outer-screen additions via blockages/edge details.
As you can see, there's more houses hinted at outside the walls, making it seem bigger than it actually is.
Again, outside the edges there's hint of more areas.
This map is all you see of this town. It has two shops, an inn and three houses you can enter. The rest you can't but it gives the illusion that there's more houses in other areas - both with visual prompts and verbal ones.
3 - A couple of smaller maps that are mapped in such a way as to give the feel of more outside what you can see, but only allow you access to those maps in question.
A 2-map town but the cut-off gives the illusion that there's more outside the viewing area that can't be seen, thus can't be visited.
The paths lead out of town but there's an expectation of more due to how it's mapped.
4 - A handful of maps which have a lot of built-up houses/areas you can't visit to give the feel of anonymous cityscape.
There are three houses you can visit on this map.
This place is for information gathering only. NPCs will talk to you but that's it.
5 - A mix of the above. AKA, make a big-ass city/town.
Welcome to Tontaria.
It's a city.
A rather large city.
As you can see, there are houses you cannot get in to.
There's also a few screens worth of area to explore.
It's pretty large.
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
author=LibertyThe idea of this ridiculously tiny little 20x15 screenshot being the entire town is absolutely beautiful. Unfortunately it sounds like that's not actually the case in that game. That's kind of a shame; I love the idea of specifically cutting the edge of the map off at a point that doesn't look anything at all like the edge of a map is supposed to look. It would be a great way to add an illusion of the area being larger. Your other towns have buildings pushing out of the edges, but the edges still look like edges. They have town walls and other barriers, and specific exit spots marked by road tiles.
Plus, the idea of the area being exactly one screen big is an extremely strong cue to the player that they are viewing only a "snapshot" of the town. I think that would work extremely well, even if the player could travel between several different such areas. When the map scrolls as you walk but cuts off at a specific point, the player thinks, "Oh, this is the edge of the area." But when the map is the same size as the screen, and doesn't scroll, the player thinks, "I guess this is just all that fits on screen."
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