Pretty Maps; Bad Design.
05-08-2013, 02:55 AM
This thread is just an excuse for me to rant about map design, so feel free to ignore it...
I was flipping through the Maps and screenshots thread and there were a lot of pretty maps. There were significantly less maps I'd feel good about playing through. Too much clutter, and scenery that is hard to read. RPG Maker XP games in general seem to attract this problem; minimap scripts and player locator scripts were built to fix this! Overloading a player with visual information with exhaust them, and who wants to play a game that makes them tired.
The worst offense to spacial navigation in RPG Maker XP is Fog. In case you didn't know, RPG Maker XP has a option that lets designers overlay a transparent pattern over the screen, called a Fog Graphic. There are some interesting ones, like water or clouds, but the ones I always see used is either fog or sandstorm.
Fog is useful for setting a mood, but like real fog, it obscures the player's vision. This isn't good! This means the player has to spend extra effort to pick out the tiles from the texture on the screen to figure out where they can walk.
Speaking of walking, having only a few different kinds of walkable tiles per area is a good idea. As is making obstacles more contrasty than passables. This way the obstacles will stand out to the player's eyes and help them notice the difference between the two. Sadly, the default RTP for RPGmXP doesn't follow this rule much at all.
Too many non-walkable tiles is another problem I see often. Every tree or pot or bush is something the player was to figure out how to walk around. This leads to the player feeling cramped, which is probably what you want in a city or forest but certainly not in an open field.
I was flipping through the Maps and screenshots thread and there were a lot of pretty maps. There were significantly less maps I'd feel good about playing through. Too much clutter, and scenery that is hard to read. RPG Maker XP games in general seem to attract this problem; minimap scripts and player locator scripts were built to fix this! Overloading a player with visual information with exhaust them, and who wants to play a game that makes them tired.
The worst offense to spacial navigation in RPG Maker XP is Fog. In case you didn't know, RPG Maker XP has a option that lets designers overlay a transparent pattern over the screen, called a Fog Graphic. There are some interesting ones, like water or clouds, but the ones I always see used is either fog or sandstorm.
Fog is useful for setting a mood, but like real fog, it obscures the player's vision. This isn't good! This means the player has to spend extra effort to pick out the tiles from the texture on the screen to figure out where they can walk.
Speaking of walking, having only a few different kinds of walkable tiles per area is a good idea. As is making obstacles more contrasty than passables. This way the obstacles will stand out to the player's eyes and help them notice the difference between the two. Sadly, the default RTP for RPGmXP doesn't follow this rule much at all.
Too many non-walkable tiles is another problem I see often. Every tree or pot or bush is something the player was to figure out how to walk around. This leads to the player feeling cramped, which is probably what you want in a city or forest but certainly not in an open field.
