Game & Map Screenshots 11

@Avery Thank you for the advice. I managed to change some stuff like reducing the size and fixing the cliff heights. I haven't filled in the map yet, to wait on your input.

I'm still working on creating tree walkways that make sense at the bottom. That will different monster types based on location, that's why it's not totally reduced.

@DeBaby28 I think that there is still a lot more you could do with your cliffs. At the moment, each cliff goes straight up to the next main level with 100% regularity. It would look much better, imo, if you broke those straight lines with bits of cliff which were of differing heights. Here is an old map of mine where I still have the screenshot on my hard disk. If you look at, e.g., the southwest corner you can see what I mean.

It also has 3 sets of steps on it. pluevnr is right to say that your stairs look like ladders. However, I think that just putting an extra tile in so that the bottom sticks out looks silly. Steps in cliffs should look, as far as possible, as if they have been carved out of the cliff face. If they are sticking out at the bottom, that wrecks that illusion. Instead, I take my cliff edge back in a tile at the top. That allows me to get the extra tile in.

Here is Alson, a small mountain village. I made it with FSM Town of Beginnings (I still don't know how to draw, unfortunately). I'm hoping for feedback on how to make it better.

Your waterfall has no source. In general, mountain rivers have their sources in grottos or whatever lies inside the mountain. It doesn't pop like this on the floor
Your stairs look like ladders, you need to put some stair tiles before the cliff to make it more natural
you didn't use the cliff borders tiles, you only used the normal grass to draw your borders and it doesn't look well
your houses are very similar and lack of details
the village is kinda empty, you should add more little vegetation (grass, flower) and human built stuff (benches or whatever)

Thanks for the feedback! I honestly don't see what I could add to the houses (and made them look similar on purpose, they're made from the same material by the same kind of people), but I tried to take the rest into account. Hopefully it's better now.

@ShiningPhoibe Let's take this house as an example of some of the things you need to be thinking about.

View attachment 200573

First of all, placement. There is a back to any house, but you have placed this one so close to the cliff face that any window at the back will be blocked by the cliff itself. There needs to be some space between any house and a cliff, unless it is clearly designed to be cut out of the rock face itself.

Your path ends before the door. People do not jump the last step leaving the grass intact, so your path needs to go right up to the door. You will need to use shift+click mapping to do that.

Is it really the case that there is no window in the main part of the house?
Your chimney is right next to the door, so anyone entering will more or less fall into the hearth. It also means that all the heat will be lost out of the door, and the family can't use it for e.g. cooking. Move the chimney into a more central position, as a fire place is more naturally at the centre of a house. This is true of all your houses.

Your roof is simply wrong. That is not a flat roof, but a sloping one. It cannot extend that far out without altering the height of the main part of the house. In addition, you need to use shift+click mapping when using autotiles like that in order to avoid that end line appearing between the 2 sections. If you want to have a section of a house coming out like that, there is no option to using a gable style roof. By that I mean something like this (from a map example by Candacis)
View attachment 200574

To add to pluevnr's point about your water source, water doesn't start off with such a wide expanse, it always begins small, narrow, and only broadens out when it has had to chance to draw in additional streams etc. In your revised version there is no obvious origin for all that water. If I were doing this map, I would have the stream (narrow) emerging from that cave and making its way down, with the waterfalls down such high cliffs having distinct foam at the bottom where the water hits the ground.

I do, however, query the whole layout. Why have people carried an enormous amount of timber and statues up incredibly narrow and steep steps to build this village which appears to have no way of supporting itself? There are no gardens or fields, so what do they eat? They are too far away from any forest to be a timber supplier to the cities, they are not mining or manufacturing anything. They have no famous shrine for devotees to come to, so why are they up a mountain in the first place? Do you really need them to be so high up, and so scattered? What function does this village have in your story? Can you make that function more explicit?