FROM ARCHADES TO CRESCENT ~ TOWN DESIGN FOR THE SOLO DEV

Depending on the style of game and storytelling that you're going for, you could even forego towns entirely, and boil the usual player interactions of such into its basic parts and implement them into something else.

My current project has no towns, and instead has a pair of merchant characters that you run into at regular intervals during the adventure that have all of the expected commodities of a town: items, weapons, armor, and an inn. It's a somewhat similar setup to Final Fantasy X, who had a merchant character that followed you around in between the game's small number of traditional towns.

The idea of these "mobile towns" also grants new opportunities for character development; FFX's merchant O'aka had a story to tell throughout the course of the game, which might be more interesting to players than the typical "behind the counter" merchants that you'll never see again.

EDIT: Personally... I don't like gigantic towns like Rabanastre or Archades from a pacing perspective. As gorgeous and bustling as towns like those tend to be, I feel as if their impact is lessened if it means that players have take significant amounts of time away from the action in order to explore them all, talk to everyone, and find everything. Bigger isn't always better.

author=SgtMettool
Depending on the style of game and storytelling that you're going for, you could even forego towns entirely, and boil the usual player interactions of such into its basic parts and implement them into something else.

author=Craze
...that towns are mapped out (i.e. not a menu)...

? ??

One of the things I take inspiration from (thought I haven't implemented it as much as I ought), are the Zelda games.

If you remember a Link to the Past, you always were heading back to town for some reason or another. It had that metroidvania feel: you unlocked something that made you go back to town, and that unlocked another thing, and so on and so forth. To me, they got some of the most value out of a town than any other game I played. Not only was the town useful for progressing the plot, but they'd also have other things to do: you could make good money playing the claw-game, you could access different areas you normally couldn't get to, the shop would update with different items over time, and you could trade items with the townspeople in the hopes of eventually getting a cool secret item.

In terms of content, towns are some of the fastest devoured: you get in, buy items, heal at the inn, and leave. But with those Zelda ideas, you can give the player reason to return. Link to the Past only had one town, but it always had reasons to keep you coming back.

Another good idea is a "growing town" used in some games. In Dragon Age 3, you build a castle and fill it with people over time. In Metal Gear Solid V, you build the Motherbase and fill it with soldiers you capture, and build structures on to it, and it acts as a "hub" of sorts.

author=Craze
And then we have a game like Final Fantasy 12, which only has a few towns but each one is gorgeous, complex, and has a wide variety of shops and bazaars and hunt-related characters and running around yelling you're Basch and etc. That's a lot of effort for lots of positive player experience.

Care to elaborate on what these towns did in this game? I haven't played this game, so I can' tell whether the "hunt-related characters and running around yelling..." was purposeful and complimented the narrative or just fluff.

The way to get players to care about towns is to actually add things that give them incentive to stay there and interact with their environment. This doesn't mean "side-quests" mind you, but rather keeping your narrative intact and actually assisting the player with the core gameplay. Nothing's worse than NPCs who blurt random nonsense that is completely detached from the world around them or what's going on, it makes an area built for interacting feel like a giant waste of time.



This is a great vid on just on how RPGs began and particularly how the game Dragon Quest revolutionized RPGs at the time. Go to around 23:10 for where he talks about the game's writing and towns. NPCs actually helped in advancing the gameplay and everything was very purposeful.

Maybe it's because I'm a big impatient gorilla, but I hate RPG towns, and never explore them beyond locating the weapon/armor/item signs out front of their respective shops and remembering them for later. I dread large towns, and I especially dread having to locate a specific trigger point or NPC to advance the plot. I admire FF12's sense of aesthetics and liveliness, but I'd rather cut off an arm than actually play that game again.

Design-wise, if I'm forced to make a town, it's always a small vertical slice that fits into a screen or two, tops - give a feel for the inhabitants, the local customs and culture, and the color palette/mood/environment. An RPG town is rarely going to even come close to the scale of a "real" town, so concentrating the relevant bits and leaving the rest to the player's imagination is respectful to the player's time and cuts down on the development cost, both.

The only non-MMO RPG I can think of where I actually explored entire towns is Star Ocean 2, and the only reason for that was to pickpocket every single NPC. Sure, it might be a pretty lame meta-goal, but it did get me to take the scenic route, as it were.

author=LockeZ
Here's a clever way to get a big town with a lot less effort: when a dungeon is cleared, remove the enemies from it and turn it into a peaceful town area.

You could theoretically do this for every dungeon, or you could do it for every third or fourth dungeon but make 100% of the towns appear this way, or you could do it just once.

That's... actually pretty clever. Good on ya.

more brain shit

This is pretty much in concert with the rest of the thread, but I'm of the opinion that towns exist first and foremost to serve up NPCs for the player to interact with. If your innkeep has something to say about each plot event, and your market is full of interesting merchants conspiring against one another, and the guards have worthwhile observations that they've dreampt up from their long, peaceful shifts, then you've already won half the battle. I think it's best to plan out what interactions you want in your town, and THEN go about planning your layout, so as to best guide your player passed each one. Perhaps tuck a few in harder-to-reach places, for the explorers to enjoy.

Further, I-

author=Corfaisus

...Hold on, what?

Things in your game you didn't make:

• The engine.
• The tiles.
• The music.
• Hell, we'll be succinct. Not a single resource used by the game.

You chose to forego the process of spriting hundreds of tiles. You decided against composing a list of MIDIs. Your battle mechanics are decided for you thirteen years in advance. You've made these decisions to skip the parts of game development where you are unskilled, so you can focus your efforts elsewhere.

The whole point of these pre-made, free-to-use assets is to lighten the workload of the solo developer. The whole point of this thread is to swap ideas on how to streamline your workflow to be more efficient. To increase the amount of quality and quantity you get from each hour at your desk. This has somehow escaped you, because you're too wildly eager to jump down people's throats for a chance to put yourself above them in some imaginary pecking order.

author=Corfaisus
Or you could, I dunno, try and improve your craft.

Your argument is that you shouldn't improve your efficiency; you should sit at the grindstone and mindlessly piece together towns the way Nessy would paint her portraits, or the way I would optimize my code. You're advocating the exact opposite of this quote. Premade resources are what allow us to each ply our crafts.

I hope you can go back to the opening post and re-read it without the puke-tinted shades. Craze's premise is right in the center of his post, in big bold letters. "So, how do you get the best ratio of effort to player experience out of your towns?" Address his post, not your own dramaticized, invented version of it, and do so with a thoughtful response that shows you care about the quality and timeliness of your game.

Or, preferably, do not post at all.

I absolutely hated most of FF12's towns. Especially Rabanastre. Fuck any town that tries to get me to stay there and do errands instead of continuing to pursue some sort of conflict. And fuck any town big enough that it needs a tram system.

I don't dislike the way traditional JRPG towns work, where you just go in and talk to seven people and shop for new weapons and armor. It bothers me when seven people and a couple shops are laid out in Dragon Warrior fashion as though they were an entire city, though, just from an aesthetic standpoint. But I am completely happy - overjoyed, even - if that's all there is to do but the locale is more interesting/relevant.

My #1 goal in any town is to leave it.