NEW DEVELOPER MAPPING HELP THREAD

The tree line at the top is way too straight. Way too much open space. You could move the left house much more to the right, closer to the rest of the houses and then decrease the size of the map accordingly. Fill up empty grass patches with tall grass, flowers, rocks, trees, a well. Maybe some fences that hold animals. Could make a small beach at the coast. Maybe add a small fishing pier.

LightningLord2, there's a common error new mappers make and that is making everything too large. They create big maps and leave a lot of empty space. I see insides of small houses so big a simple room takes up the whole screen. Since starting from VX the basic style was changed to accomodate 1 tile tall characters (from the 1.5 tile tall default used in 2003), it is more easier to make this error.

In this style everything is intended to be small and simple. The VX and VX Ace sample maps had 1 tile tall buildings for regular houses (which was poorly done because the top of the character's head always touched the roof when it auto-moved into the entrance) and those are the proportions this old-school style suggests. You can see this in the old NES final fantasy games or the earlier dragon warrior games. The dungeon wall was only 1 tile tall in them for instance.

In the case of making wilderness maps you are very limited. Everything if a square shape lazily put into auto-tiles. Even if you make the trees less straight you'll end up making them diagonally placed blocks which doesn't solve the problem. You are always making generic artificial dungeons, even if you wish to create a forest or a village. This whole style is incapable of making something feel natural. At least that's the way I see it. My best advice is to stick to simple and small shapes as intended.

As an extra, let me provide a few examples that show how heavily limited this whole thing is. (This might get off-topic, so don't read if you're not interested.)

author=FarkasUrdung
-long post-

The style of VX/VX Ace/MV is only good for drawing blocks. Deviating from that is doomed to result in failure.

Agreed. I think the VX/Ace/MV style is fine for very simplistic maps, but anything nice or fancy using the RTP just doesn't work out too well.

author=ZephyrAe
Thanks all for the feedback. I fixed up the maps, now that I'm thinking about it I included the following as screenshots for the gallery.

"Photo not found." for both images.
edit: Oversized, bland and empty. Should be way, way smaller than they're now. I'm assuming these are lay-outs only, because they need stuff in them, lol.

Taking a screenshot in the editor tends to not go over well for submissions. They should be taken while the game is running. The blue checkerboard pattern being present isn't helping your submission, and for whatever reason (maybe it's just me?) it looks kind of blurry.

Hey, this looks like the place for me!

I'm working on a game project called The Third World. As the game opens, the player finds himself in a fractured landscape, as shown below. The idea is to show that reality itself has been warped (there's more to it, but that's all the player is told at this point ^_^):







Later on, they move into more conventional caves / fields / fortresses and the like, but all is still not as it seems.

As it stands, the project's been denied because the images are sub-standard. Any suggestions / feedback / input are welcome... ^_^

Thanks in advance!

author=InfectionFiles
edit: there we go!

but yes, Professor you need to take advice from this thread as those maps are horrendous.

edit3: I mean, I don't want to be unhelpful and rude but I would just start over with all those maps and rethink your design because I wouldn't even know where to start with those maps.

^_^ No offence. They were meant to be horrendous, but I think the "It's deliberate" gambit is a pretty poor one to pull. Working on making them more coherent! =)

Liberty: That example is awesome, thanks a lot! ^_^

Working on it right away. =)

author=Steelwing
Hello! I have to admit, I'm pretty new here and I've been working on my first game for almost a month now. It's completed and everytime I submit it it gets denied because of this reason: "The mapping is below the supported quality of the site or something like that." What does that mean? My theory is that the maps are not good made or that the tilesets are misused? What am I missing here? Link to my screenshots: http://rpgmaker.net/games/8489/

Thanks for helping me out and please be nice :)

We can't see your page since it hasn't been accepted yet. Please upload your screenshots to your locker and post them here ^_^

@Steelwing: I think you could start with learning by example, checking out some other maps done with the tilesets you're using, and trying to learn their composition style. You can try looking for screenshots of other projects to see how they use the tilesets you're planning to use, and learn from their style/composition. For instance, there are many great projects with excellent REFMAP mapping (Carlsev Saga and Steel Spirit SaGa come to mind). Since you plan to use REFMAP (the tilesets you're using for the dungeon and the snowy place), you can learn a lot from playing those games. Also, I see that you made an RTP map as well (the one that seems to be a cutscene), and you can check out Hero's Realm to have some ideas on how to map with the RTP, it cotains brilliant examples.

So, once you check out the mapping on those games, and how the authors did different things, and the overall compositions of the maps, you'll be able to improve upon your own maps with what you learned. Once you do that, you can post stuff here for more feedback, and we'll help you further :).

Very well, about your maps: the church-library screen looks good, except for those lions on the floor, which look out of place. As for the dungeon one (with the rock and the door), maybe it'd be better if you started by checking out the way some other projects handled mapping with that tileset. I think Carlsev Saga and Steel Spirit SaGa (mentioned above) made use of that tileset, and you might want to check how they use it, so you can have some references on how to use the tileset.

As it stands right now, it's hard to know what you meant to do in the dungeon one. The RTP one seems to be from a cutscene, right? I'm afraid the tree placement is a tad too linear, it kinda loses naturality that way. Try to spread them in a more "angular" way, so to say.

Still, all in all, I appreciate your eagerness and initiative, and I'm sure you'll improve if you keep trying, but there's a whole lot to improve still.