FROM ARCHADES TO CRESCENT ~ TOWN DESIGN FOR THE SOLO DEV

I tried to wipe my brain clean but I wasn't done yet and continued to shit.

author=Jude

author=Corfaisus
The answer to all the questions posed in this thread? Maximize your effort/whatever by making all towns a menu with a pretty graphic behind them. Draw one thing, throw in a couple message boxes and you're done. Now wasn't that easy? But here's the thing, that's not the answer. You don't want menus in your face all day, you want to be able to live in this fantasy world. This requires that you take the time out of your day to develop this fantasy world.

You know how I got to be so "good" (I don't think it's a matter of being good or better than others, so much as I'm finding myself less new things to learn)? People stomped on my balls with some cold hard truth. Once my balls had the time to heal, I went back and looked at my abomination of a map. I made some changes until I thought it was at a point where I wouldn't get my balls stomped on again.

A few things. First, Craze's opening post specifically states we're talking about towns that aren't just a menu. Second, "try harder" isn't actionable information. Third, you're equating tile layout with a town being good, when it's only a small aspect of it. This post isn't about how to do the least, it's about how to get the most out of what you do.

That's why there's stuff like NPCs and music to breathe life into your town. And no matter how you want to spin it, the layout of tiles on your map actually does quite a bit in terms of making your town good.

author=Corfaisus
That's why there's stuff like NPCs and music to breathe life into your town. And no matter how you want to spin it, the layout of tiles on your map actually does quite a bit in terms of making your town good.

More insightful, actionable information from Corfaisus: NPCs and stuff. You're looking at this from too low of a level. It doesn't matter how you capture the hill when holding it doesn't win the war.

author=Corfaisus
The only way it's going to become more actionable or insightful is if I'm already in your game. I don't know your game, I can't tell you how to make it. What works for your game doesn't work for every game.

Nah, you don't need a specific reference to talk about design principles--at least I don't, and neither do people much savvier than I am.

Let's talk about an aspect of layout, which is supposed to be one of your specialties, which I'll refer to as Centrality.

The centrality of a place can be evaluated by its connectivity with other trafficked places. In other words, you want to think about your town's layout in clusters, and then to plot the most important cluster central to the other clusters--this doesn't necessarily mean the geographic center of the town, but the traversable center where all paths coalesce, which is most often the geographic center or the town entrance. Intuitively, this means the item shop is in proximity to the weapon shop, which is in proximity to armor shop. This is intuitive to you because shopping districts exist in all RPGs and in real cities too. This improves the player's experience in a town because a frequent reason for a player returning to a town is to restock items and upgrade their gear. By centralizing this function, a player's time isn't wasted by having to trek from one corner of the map to the other.

However, this extends beyond shopping. If an NPC is useful for scenario advancement, it is beneficial for that NPC to also have high centrality to improve their discoverability. This is the reason you often find important NPCs standing near the inn, or prostitutes by airport motels. This helps with a game's pacing, but also cultivates and then rewards player expectations--I can find things where I think I can find them based on intuition and previous experience.

Ideally, to get the most out of both Centrality and Explorability, your centralized NPCs are not critical for scenario advancement, but instead direct players to the more hidden fringes of the map, where the critical NPC resides. This rewards a player's intuition, but also the player who wants to discover the critical path independently. This is a principle that even the first Dragon Quest understands. One of the most centralized NPCs the town of Rimuldar tells you that somewhere in town is a hard-to-find Magic Key shop, a part of the scenario's critical path.

This is just an obvious example, but it's not hard to look at design through a more academic lense without having a specific game to review.

author=Red_Nova
If I remember correctly, the "town" was actually just a location on the world map, and you could directly enter the houses from the world map. So the only effort spent on the town itself was placing down the houses on the overworld.

oh my god you're right

I think there's also a nice way to have a happy medium between a mapped town and a menu-only "town" -- you can still have a town map, and the screen pans around depending on which building you have selected on the menu. Thass what I'm doing. not spending hours in the map editor on it though so it will probably look like shit and i should quit now

author=Ratty524
Guys, seriously? Did this thread have to get derailed into a shit-flinging fest where instead of actually discussing about the topic at hand, we're attacking other people's character? Cool it.

In all fairness to the rest of the folks here, I kind of started the name-calling, without offering a constructive response to the OP. Allow me to remedy that here.

First, a comment on the sprawling cities of Final Fantasy XII. I really liked them. I thought they were clever, intriguing, full of depth, and packed with interesting people--the first time I played the game. On subsequent journeys, I found them rather tedious.

I think a lot of modern RPGs (not necessarily JRPGs) have the same problem: They want to offer these massive, cool places to explore, but can't make the experience worthwhile more than once. The Elder Scrolls games fall into this category for me, and it's part of the reason I only ever finished Oblivion one time.

Is this worse or better than Final Fantasy 1's boring nothing-towns? It's difficult to say, but as with most things, the ideal truth lies somewhere in the middle of the extremes.

I believe that a few towns should be spectacular and most should be plain. Sometimes a town's only purpose is to serve as a way-station between dungeons (and, in some instances, perhaps an actual way-station would be better than a town!); you should not put much effort into creating those towns because the player is not going to spend much effort exploring them.

Unless something important to the story happens in a town, players are going to come into town, sleep at the inn, buy any new gear, restock consumables, and then leave. A few of the more prudent ones will talk to all the NPCs and fewer still will check all the nooks and crannies of every building for hidden stuff, and every once in a while it's worth rewarding those players. But these places don't need to be special, and they don't need to take up a lot of time. Just enough to fit in aesthetically with the world around them.

As for towns that you want players to remember, it takes very little to make a place memorable, and less still to make it meaningful. It's as easy as adding a distinct piece of architecture or an NPC with a witty piece of dialogue. Even if your mapping skills are terrible, players will remember the town where that shopkeeper subtly threatens you with violence if you don't buy his stuff, or the town built around an old, dilapidated power plant.

Those are the places where, ideally, the things in your story will happen. Those are the places players will explore and remember. So, those are the places you should spend a large amount of effort on. The rest can take a back seat.

author=Corfaisus
Fuck me.

Happy?

Fine. You win. I'm gonna go hang myself.

You do you, Craze. You make your game as you see fit. Sometimes disregarding the three-tile rule and "academia" (there's a massive difference between memorizing something and actually utilizing it; any professor will tell you this) might allow you to create your own style.

Paint by numbers. No matter what you do in RPG Maker, 90% of the work is done for you. Stop shitting on others because you're absolutely no better.

I was never here.

Still no actionable information contained in this post. Corfaisus, I don't think you even know what makes a town good and this is why you can't provide anything other than "try harder."