Chastitas: The Broken Land

As time goes by and you keep working in your game you will naturally be better in several aspects. Including mapping design. If you are not satisfied with your previous maps you can always rework them.

You won't improve your mapping from one day to another. The only advice I can give you is to don't use RTP maps and make parallax mapping instead. You gotta be a damn expert in mapping to create beautiful looking maps with RTP (I've seen a few though). Parallax might more difficult but it's easier to make good looking maps.

Eitherway, as I had alrady said, you need time to improve. You can't get better instantly.

So looking at your world map. The basis of it is good. Its broad and expansive. However, being so broad and expansive means you need to detail it here and there. Little lakes, little tree clumps outside of giant forests. I much prefer the broad expansive maps vs tinsy little world maps like Final Fantasy Legend. The mountains are rolling and look good. But again little details. If an entire screen is almost completely full of 1 tile (grass, forest), you need to have some flair to it.

Your towns look like they need details too. Telbooze needs more barrels, maybe patches of grass, or darker soil or something, because its just sand. Put some palm trees near houses. Also surround the town with a wall to restrict and focus movement of the player to bottlenecks. Maybe not even a wall, but some sort of line. Tree line, boxes or whatever. You need paths leading to houses. You have a giant path through town, but even a humble broken stone path leading to buildings might be nice. Put up fences, Fences make good neighbors. Some houses need windows. You have wide open spaces, and logically over decades, empty spaces will get filled up with something. Boxes or something. Some 2 floor buildings would be nice. Think of how cool it would be to pop out a stairway to access a special 2nd floor. Maybe even have a bridge going from one building to another. Put something on the next building that you can only access by going out of the 2nd floor of the adjacent building. You would need switches and events to make it so you can go under or over the bridge.

As for the interiors. Make a black border around the interior. DO IT! Do not line a wall up with the edge of a map. Why get it away from the edge? Because the player should always be at the center of the screen, unless you're making an old school Nintendo game. You can adjust the map properties and then map shift to get the wall away from the map border.

Your interiors are good, however, you lack windows my friend. Some interiors are just too big like your Inn and Pub. So much empty space. Tighten it up. Put some rugs in the inn. Also the wall heights are a bit too tall for the curtains that you're using. Find some 3 tile tall curtains or just don't use them. A lot of your interiors fall into the 'too big' category. You either need to shrink the sizes of the room or fill them with stuff. Some things are full of good stuff where it adds to the map. Places like the box maze. But you can't box maze every giant room.

To top it off, you disable dashing... in giant maps.

The bandit 'town' is giant too. Wow too giant. It takes quite a while to walk it.

By shrinking everything, it will result in less work.

Also your blocker gates in the dungeon don't / won't work. When they're down, you need to make them 'Through.' To be honest, I'm happy you made shutters and switches like that. A lot of dungeon makers don't.

I'm happy with your dungeon making skills. Not the giant bandit hideout, but the other one. The one that's compact and uses the random generator that you detailed. Much better than other first timers.

Talking helps motivation :-)

Also here's a tip for testing.

Step 1 make the map with no enemies.
Step 2 no matter where the map is in the game, like map 32... have a quick warp for testing purposes to the map.
Step 3 play test the map see if everything works and see if you can make it through from start to finish.
Step 4 automatically level up your entire party from the start to the quick warp to where you feel their level should be in 'map 32'
Step 5 make all the best equipment for map 32 and equip your party and make the best equipment 0 GP
Step 6 make monsters
Step 7 flood map with monsters
Step 8 play test with the best equipment against the monsters
Step 9 if something feels boring, dull or useless (like a healer that has no one to heal) give them something useful and teak everything.
Step 10 Make the gold value of all the equipment based on what you have the monsters at and how much gold you ended up having by the end of 'map 32'
Step 11 play test from start of the game to map 32 without the quick warp or quick level up.

Basically the quick warp and the 0 GP best armor will save you so much time. I used to not use that method and like grind through each of my games over and over again. Wasting days of time each time.

And yes you should use the random generator and detail it. Make a little puzzle or switch here and there. More people need to do that, because there are so many straight forward terrible dungeons out there or dungeons broken up like zelda screens.

Zelda works for Zelda (and Final Fantasy Adventure) when the combat enemies are on screen. I don't think it works for a traditional random encounter RPG. Plus a lot of Zelda types just have 1 exit per side of the screen instead of making the whole side of the screen be the exit.