ADD A GIANT CANNON TO IT

A game localized entirely within one city can have smaller "towns" within it. Take Neverwinter from the eponymous Neverwinter Nights as an example: the entire game takes place inside a single city, yet there are areas with their owns vendors, inns and NPCs homes scattered about (sub-towns, as it were, some contained entirely within a single building). Since your game takes place around a single town, I thought maybe it had smaller districts for each of the various mythological beasts, each with their own set of shops.

author=LockeZ
Worldbuilding always strikes me as another term for masturbating. It's something you do for your own sake, at the player's expense, because you have some idea inside of you that you want to get out. Where as actual game design is the other way around. Its purpose is to depict the gameplay in a meaningful and entertaining way, and to direct the gameplay to the enjoyable parts while preventing people from doing boring lame shit.

My primary goal in towns is to prevent people from doing boring lame shit, which is hard because that's practically synonymous with towns.

If you don't like worldbuilding, it's probably never going to end up a strong element of your games, so you might as well not worry too much about it, but I absolutely disagree that it's purely an exercise in self-satisfaction for the creator. Good worldbuilding is one of my favorite elements in some of my favorite games. And while I can enjoy a game without it, I definitely will notice when a game doesn't put too much thought in on that front. For instance, Final Fantasy VII did a good job with its "stick a cannon on it" approach, but I definitely couldn't help noticing, for instance, that there's no viable land or sea route between Midgar and Junon, the world's two largest cities, both run by Shinra, on the same continent, and air travel isn't accessible to most of the populace, and nobody ever seems to mention this. The path between the two literally involves trekking through a monster-infested abandoned mine with a huge swamp with a deadly giant serpent in it on one side. On the whole, the layout of the world basically doesn't make sense.

I guess one way you can take that is an illustration of how far you can go without bothering a huge proportion of the player population. But when game developers work to make their worlds feel more like actual worlds, I do notice and appreciate it.

But since I think the best approach to making good games (at least if you don't have a full team where you can get a proper division of labor) is to focus on your strengths by paying attention to the elements of games you enjoy the most, I think that if you're someone who should be focusing that level of attention on worldbuilding, you've probably already noticed what kind of worldbuilding elements you do and don't enjoy.

I mean I really don't see RPGs always needing to be tight Joss Whedon movies or something. Things like the scan visor in Metroid Prime let you consume the world at your own pace and I think that's kind of unique to games. Optional NPCs being a little too lore informative isn't as bad as the game intro being padded out with history lessons. Other than that, there's nothing that unique about world building as an element. Every preferential idea you come up with is basically masturbatory, you just gotta find ways to make it connect with other people in methods that make sense.

Wait, LockeZ you're an admin now?

author=LockeZ
You may kiss my ring if you so desire.

*smooches ring* We are LockeZ