Game & Map Screenshots 12

I've been tweaking some areas around the town of Dawnbreak. The town acts like a hub for the rest of the game so it's important it has notable areas of interest for the player to get easily familiar with it. There's also a few sections at night that trigger sidequests to be done during the day, but still pondering whether I want the full "DQ approach" to having fully explorable towns at night (would be a lot of work!):

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I've been tweaking some areas around the town of Dawnbreak. The town acts like a hub for the rest of the game so it's important it has notable areas of interest for the player to get easily familiar with it. There's also a few sections at night that trigger sidequests to be done during the day, but still pondering whether I want the full "DQ approach" to having fully explorable towns at night (would be a lot of work!):

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Map Design it is a bigger challenge than it looks :3

Here are a few examples of my maps, and the principles I followed:

Map 1:
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Map 2:
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Map 3:
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Map 1 is a house that had recently been burglarised.

Firstly, to make it obvious that it's a house, I compartmentalised the space (separating it into rooms), and adding dedicated units (like beds, stoves, etc). To make it clear that something happened and to guide the player there, the end room (where the burglary took place) had been marked with footprints and a saw. It is also visible as you enter the house, making the player quickly interested.

My main self-critique is that the floorboards of the main room and bedrooms are different, which could communicate unnecessary information. Perhaps only changing the floor of the robbed room would make it better stand out.

Map 2 is Mycelia, a village inhabited by Fly Muscaria (a race of Mushrooms). It is located in a cave.

To make it easy for the player to navigate, but also give it a feeling of haphazardness, there is a broken, yet visible pathway. I also kept the space small and compact to increase the information density, without adding unnecessary detail. The abundance of mushrooms growing and grass on the ground communicates the presence of life somewhere, and it has something to do with Mushrooms. Finally, the house on the top is physically further away than the other two, and has a different colour scheme to communicate that that particular house is different in some way.

That being said, I feel like I may have added too much detail: the large amount of floor decorations could be seen as clutter. There are also stone steps randomly placed which don't need to be there.

Map 3 is actually an example of what not to do. It is the beginning of an area called Crystal Fields.

Because of RPGMaker MV's 999 map limit, I have been merging zones together to avoid reaching that limit (my game is going to be a very big story). However, I have found plenty of drawbacks:

- The area does not convey much information. It is mostly an intermediate zone. Despite that, it is a very large map, where travelling across it could take ~1 minute when it really should only need ~10-20 seconds.
- There are some elements which may communicate information that's unecessary. For example, the log on the left side does not serve any role, apart from decoration, but there is also no context to imply that it's unimportant. The left-side also has a fence below the stall, but does not serve any purpose.
That being said, I do feel like I have some things right, like on the right side, there is an egg (which carry items), which is inaccessible by the normal route, which could encourage exploration. In absolute terms, the map does have a fair amount of interesting elements, like stalls, a building and a bench.

What I really need to do is to greatly reduce the size of the map, and cut out unnecessary elements.

I would love to hear your thoughts on my self-critique and also hear your feedback ;D ♥

Got one question, why the wall height on map 1 (top middle) is different compared to the other rooms?
The other rooms height seems only 1 block but the top middle room height seems 2 blocks.

@thepsyche GORGEOUS, so pretty!!!!! Your game is one of the best-looking RPG Maker games I've seen around.

@MythrilKnight There's a couple of height issues for the cliffs (it fluctuates from 1 tile high to 2 to 3 at several points), and I would also add some trees grass, rocks etc. to the cliffs themselves as well, as they're pretty empty now.