OMEGAHUNTER'S PROFILE

Towns. One of the most dreaded words for a mapper to hear. They're not so hard to make in theory, in fact I believe I'm pretty good at making a good village or two. The problem is when you realize that you're going to need to end up mapping another 10-20 or so cities, then mapping the interiors of all the buildings, then making a ton of NPCs to wander the town, then coming up with meaningful dialogue for each of them, and so on.

I'm pretty sure we've all been there at some point. I'm at the early stage of development in an RPG, and it just hit me that sooner or later I'm gonna have to add some villages to the fairly big game world I'm working on. So I was wondering, what are some alternatives people use to avoid having to map a ton of cities out? I was thinking of having an "area select" in each village that lets you travel to the important buildings in the area, mainly the inn and shops with the occasional quest specific special area (temples, castles, someone's house, etc). The other idea is to work with a central hub and develop a single city with a lot of detail and build the game around this one central location.

So RMN, what's your take on things? How do you deal with mapping out a ton of towns for your games? Do you just man up and add all of them the old fashioned way, or do you have a less time consuming method?

Hey everyone, I'm Omega. I remember years ago when I was... 13 maybe, I got RPG Maker 2000 and tried to make some stupid game about a mercenary that has to rescue the president's daughter. President of what? I'm not sure. All I know is that they lived on some space station and that the daughter was kidnapped by some cult and taken to some forest planet. The clusterfuck of a story eventually led the mercenary and daughter ending up on some sand planet where they had to stop some monsters from attacking a town and some guy named Jack joined the part for pretty much no reason, then they ran into the cult again and rescued the princess of that planet and then went on to battle space pirates and... Yeah I don't know WHAT the fuck I was doing when I made that game lol. Its a good thing I never showed it to anyone (not that I completed it anyway) or uploaded it on the internet. I recently found it on an old computer and it reminded me of RPG Maker, so I got VX Ace and started messing with it as a hobby to get rid of boredom.

First game I made with Ace was total crap (though it was a lot better than the above game) and I ragequit around the halfway point since the story wasn't going anywhere and the gameplay was pretty crappy. I'm trying another one now and its been going pretty well I think. Better than my first attempts at least lol. I'm still not sure if I should make a page for it here though, or if I even want to upload it ever. I don't know, I'll consider it when I've got enough content to actually show off. Its mostly the default resources with a few custom sprites made in the built-in character generator and a custom soundtrack. So by "content" I mean finished sections of the game lol. I don't know the first thing about spriting, so a story with fun gameplay is about a much as I can offer.

While we're here, is it normal to enjoy making these games but not having any motivation to play other people's games? I've looked at the available games over and over again and barely any ever interested me, though I did download Star Stealing Prince and I'm loving it so far. Other than that, I don't think I've ever played someone else's game. Then again, it could just be me not having time for it since I'm busy working on my own stuff whenever I'm bored.