FROM ARCHADES TO CRESCENT ~ TOWN DESIGN FOR THE SOLO DEV

I like what kentona said - dungeons without the battles.

Personally, I like a town that has shit to do in it. Not just pit-stops for a plot-dump.

When I make towns I like to add in all kinds of stuff like treasure to find, fore-shadowing and world lore, interactive elements, sometimes gameplay stuff and of course shops and plot devices.

It really does depend on the game, though, how you go about implementing a town. There's a ton of different ways to do so and some work better for your game than another might. They're something you need to give some good thought to when it comes to implementation.

Do you have a hub town? Then that should be given a lot more effort when it comes to what is in it. Do you have a series of small towns that are just safety and upgrade points? You can add those in too - one-screen towns where not much happens but spending your loot. You can have a mix of those kinds of towns or ones which are actual dungeons you have to get through.


Woo, new page. Let's get this topic back on track and keep it there, okay? It's a cool one and shit don't need to blow up in here for no freakin reason. Just move on, all.

author=Punkitt
Aw jeez. The site headers are making a lot more sense now.

Craze: "you guys are awesome at hating things and I like that"

Corfaisus: "Stop making excuses and start making your game"

Jude: "Seriously have you guys actually read the shit you've posted?"

Liberty: "You probably don't need to have a life crisis about an internet forum"

With Punkitt's example something that comes to mind is Fallout New Vegas and the town outside a city called Freeside. Lots to do there, shops, gambling, quests and it even has enemies that will attack you there! They are weak as shit but still I like when even towns pose a little bit of danger. Nothing ever that it wouldn't want to make you go there but some enemies that add to the flavour of the town. Muggers, thieves or bar drunks can be a fun little addition to a town that poses a fight but little danger. Something about killing in town is also cool.

Threed and Saturn Valley were the only good towns in Earthbound. Every other town in that game can bite my ass, and is exactly the sort of thing Craze is trying to figure out how to avoid doing.

Onett should've just been the drug store, police station and arcade. It didn't even need a hotel, Earthbound is the kind of goofy game where you could pay a police officer $20 to spend the night in a jail cell. Twoson should've just been the theater with a couple hobos sleeping on blankets outside selling ketchup and for-sale signs. They didn't need entire cities. Everything else was meaningless.

They didn't even need to be two different cities! The theater could've been next door to the arcade, with the police roadblock just keeping you from walking down the sidewalk. Nothing of value would be lost.

Fourside could have similarly just been the Monotoli Club, combining the only two meaningful locations into one. A raver could sell you teddy bears inside, since that was the only item worth buying in the fifty-seven-story skyscraper mall. I actually don't remember anything else in Fourside. They really phoned that city in, almost none of the buildings were enterable. I'm looking at a map and see a cafe, bakery, hotel and museum, all of which I'm positive were made up by photoshoppers at starmen.net and didn't actually exist in the game.

Winters was okay in that it already did what I'm saying; it was just the boarding school and a payphone outside, it wasn't really a town. Summers, meanwhile, could be deleted from the game entirely and nobody would even notice.



If you want to have less work to do on your city, that's the ticket, I think. Cut out all that cruft. Instead of a city with a landmark in it, just make the landmark and nothing else.

Yeah, gotta agree with Versalia on this one - the cool part of the towns in Earthbound weren't that they had useful stuff in them but that places like the fleamarket and arcade and hotels and circus tents and pizza shops and everything else existed in them. You could run around and check out the town and interact with the crazies.

That said, I do wish they'd been condensed in size a bit more - they were a bit too sprawling for my personal tastes - but the overall idea of "looking around town and enjoying the atmosphere and just exploring" does add to a game. Getting rid of that aspect can make a game too much like FF13, where it's just a straight run with no fun. No one wants another FF13 (at least in that aspect).

Condense but allow people to run around and explore and poke their noses into nooks and crannies if they want.

author=Liberty
Condense but allow people to run around and explore and poke their noses into nooks and crannies if they want.

Indeed, but I think the point Locke was trying to make is that, while these things may add to your game's atmosphere, its aesthetic, its story, they don't add to the player's experience of playing the game in the sense of working towards achieving the game's goals.

And that's not a bad thing, and for some players, the aspects of atmosphere and aesthetic and story are everything. Those players will get a lot of value out of towns like that. But other players just want to focus on completing the game's goals, and those towns are a hindrance to them, and mean you put in a lot of work for nothing.

If you make a few select towns that way and also incorporate the completion of goals, it is a worthwhile experience for every player, which allows you to just include the bare necessities for other, less important towns. I think that is the maximization of efficiency in development.

Wow! Holy hell, what did I type these past few pages? Like, whoops! I got so caught up on the aesthetics, I forgot this wasn't my canvas I was spattering shit all over. I seriously think I half-read the first post, read "less effort" and my brain slammed on the breaks because I've got a predisposition to overthink everything and outdo myself.

Let's try this again.

Maybe you could give your NPCs multiple purposes so that you can cut down on the overall scope of each town and the grey matter inbetween the important bits? Like, maybe the innkeeper is also the quest giver, or maybe the guy in the pub is both the next story villain and... I dunno, someone who pushes you further ahead ("Look over there! *kicks a puppy* Hero: "Who kicked this puppy?! They must be stopped! *storms off*) or gives sweet details on the world? You get the point. That way not every town needs a castle with a king with a problem or some mystical old hermit who lives on a cliff (that hit close to home orz).

Make some buildings have multiple floors so that you can stack shops on top of each other and cut down on the extraneous grassy/river tiles you'd have thrown in to make the town more town-like. You can leave those details for cutscenes that take place just outside of town or on the worldmap. The bridge can just "be".

I do like what Kentona brought up on the first page about towns being puzzles to discover treasure and the sort. Final Fantasy V kind of did this with the secret passages behind certain houses and under bridges. It takes what's already there and uses an extra layer to carve more stuff out of the dead space. Some examples being the overpass in Carwen that lead to the Ice Rod and the Phantom Village which covers pretty much everything I brought up in this post (hidden passages and shopkeepers with various tiers of wares taking up the same space).

Having interesting characters will go a long way even in a tiny/plain town.

If you're looking purely at efficiency, then there are a few tricks you can use to help yourself. Chief among them in my arsenal (perhaps I overuse it a bit) is to use the same tileset but focus on different parts of what it can do for each town. All the regular towns in FF6 use one of two tilesets (Narshe, Vector and Zozo excluded, obviously), but I can name every town in that game at a glance. Aside from the fact that I obviously may have played it too much as a youth, the reason for it is simple: each town has a thing. Not a landmark, per se, just a thing.

Maranda has a bunch of stairs and feels very compressed, thanks to the wall that looms over it in the background. South Figaro has its curtain wall and canal that both come into play later. Jidoor has that unusual arch and its vertical alignment with the mansion at the top. Thamasa is dominated by a huge courtyard in the center. Nikeah has its bustling market. Albrook has a distinct two-story feel, with the town split equally between upper and lower. Kohlingen has a river running through it, et cetera!

Does FF6 have the best towns in any game? Naw, of course not. They're not overly memorable, they don't have worthwhile NPCs for the most part, and they don't have a gimmick. It shows you what can be done with a small repository of graphics, though, if you don't have the time/energy/skill to make something more specific to the area.

The easiest way to look at a town when you don't have the whatever needed to make a better one is to step back and see which tile it's dominated by. A big city and a big town might have similar looking buildings, but one is ringed by trees and has dirt paths while the other has a tall wall and paved streets. A small town hemmed in by thick forest might use the same tileset as a town on the plains with a river cutting through it/snaking around it, but it'd look different enough to get its own vibe.

In depth NPCs and fantastic landmarks are great, but sometimes you've got to make due with less. Keep your towns small and concise unless they really need to be bigger, and you can get a lot of mileage out of a few resources.