JALEX'S PROFILE

author=LockeZ
You're remembering things in Link to the Past that weren't really there. There were a few enemies that were integrated into puzzles, but it was pretty rare. Lots of enemies interacted with the environment and you had to deal with them while navigating the room's traps, but that's true in every Zelda game (except maybe the first one) as well as any good action/adventure game or platformer.

It's not that enemies were part of the puzzles themselves so much as the puzzles and enemies coexisted in the same environment. There was no transition between the combat and the dungeon crawling, which was (supposed to be) my original point.

I don't think that Zelda's puzzles were necessarily meant to be mind-bendingly difficult so much as provide something that isn't combat. Link to the Past, however, managed to streamline puzzles and combat almost seamlessly for its dungeons, and the result was beautiful (and your example of the pit puzzle in Link's Awakening sounds like* it follows the same idea). Ocarina of Time and later games didn't integrate puzzles and combat together as well because of the way Z-Targeting worked; you had to engage the enemy and drop whatever else you were doing.

In the context of RPG Maker, puzzles face a similar dilemma because combat usually takes place in another scene entirely. Unless you're making an action RPG, puzzle/combat integration in the vein of LttP is most likely impossible.

*Sadly, I have never played any of the Gameboy Zelda titles

WIP map of... something. I don't like how the plants are randomly littered about in the top version, but the bottom version just feels empty.

author=LockeZ
I don't think the flowers and plants are bad. They'd probably grow in clumps of similar plants in real life, though. My general opinion, I guess, is "this is better than 95% of outdoor maps, but improvement is always possible."

Hard to do much with the decoration when all you have to work with are plants. I almost always end up adding manmade things, since they're more interesting, and help give the area a story even if you don't have a single word of dialogue. If the area's totally natural, the only story it tells me is "nothing has never happened here, and nothing is happening now either." Which isn't the kind of story I think anyone likes to spend their time on. (Well, maybe some people. The kind of people who go fishing alone or sit on their porch for fun.) It's certainly not what I want from the opening of a story, the purpose of which is to hook me in and make me want to play. Try to think of what is going on in this scene, and in this area. And if the answer is nothing, try to think of what the overarching themes of the game are, and what the surrounding area has, and what the player's next goals will be, and come up with something that builds into those things somehow.

The map overall actually looks pretty nice. It's RTP, but very well used. I appreciate that you even made diagonal(ish) cliffs. Although the shadows next at their bases are kind of lol-ish.

Thank you for the input. I wasn't really expecting to be told that my mapping was above average this soon. And everything here is still a work in progress; apparently it's hard to make a cutscene when you have virtually zero storyline to work with.

In short, I'd like some advice regarding how to make maps look pretty after the design step.

The map in question:

Here I've tried randomly placing decor tiles around, and the result looks like, well, someone littered random crap everywhere. I'm not particularly fond of the result, but I (used to, at least) see this kind of design rather often in VX/Ace maps, and sometimes even lauded as "great" mapping. So I thought we could talk about this particular trend or alternative mapping methods.

(And if the design itself needs work, feel free to mention that as well)