Wouldn’t it be cool if we could go in there?
Two things first:
Avery, you make a lot of tutorials, but you never wrote one on dungeons with the unedited RTP tiles. You usually like to do that to show basic techniques without needing fancy extra stuff.
True! But… I really dislike the default tiles limitations, not just the blocky corners, I could live with that, but the lack of walkable tops to be able to bring different layers onto the same map (a cave’s inside is not flat per se!) and other missing nic-nacs make it difficult for me to show the techniques I actually like to use on such maps.
So here we go inside a mountain for the first time with me!
But before, we have to get the lore blurb out of the way. In my fictional world, there is a rebellious faction hiding in the mountains near Bremmersville, and after some questing and connecting with folk in the town you can kinda guess that Bremmer VIth, the mayor, is not only the one who has ties to them and can tell you where they are, but also that - oh no - he went missing. And in his cellar you find an entrance to the mine, whichs entrance has been closed off by a natural disaster for years and it’s been said there was no way to reopen it! What is going on? And can the heroes save Bremmer VIth?
So what has been going on is that the miners woke a
But the last time, he was not quiet enough…
That leads to a clear setting for the location: after all, we need a mine, maybe some skeletons of the workers (This is no mine, it’s a tomb) and then a lair for the beast.
First I envisioned some kind of transition from a normal mine to a fiery cave, blending tiles into each other and then I remembered that I try to do as little edits as possible in this series ;)
So I will likely go with a mine area and a part of the wall where the miners accidentally broke through and behind just use fire cave/dragon den tiles.
Mechanically I had several ideas: a very large map with not that much in it but a trail of stuff Bremmer dropped when carried away, but I know I would want to explore the full map anyways and be disappointed if that isn’t worthwhile at all.
I also thought of a hide and seek mechanic, either with the dragons elemental minions who would warn him if they detect the player or the dragon himself, but I decided to go with a very standard monster and maybe puzzles dungeon for it.
Why?
The heroes have been puckering around in that village for a bit and my fictional game is an RPG after all. As fun as it is to have out of the box stuff, at this point it had been a long time without fighting and if I want to implement a boss fight with the dragon here (and yes, I want), I just need a way for the heroes to collect some XP beforehand - best with respawning enemies after leaving and entering the map so we can really farm those sweet XP if we are underleveled for any reason.
My original plan was using my own water cave tileset
which I had used for basically all “stone wall” options in all maps for that area and also for the outside of the town where the mine is.
Here was a lengthy paragraph on options and all that, but whenever I tried to figure something out I overdid a little in the planning for this type of the tutorial.
And then it hit me.
NuraRay’s crystal mine tileset uses the exactly same MV stone as a base for the walls as my water cave (just a different shade) - and I am mapping a crystal mine.
Dun-Dun.
Guess what. I scrapped using my own set as base and decided just to use it as color reference for the recolor and build from there.
Here is a general tip: since a lot of RM artists use the same RM tiles as a base, you can find sets that are completely compatible, like PandaMaru and I both have MV ice caves and you can mix and match the tiles for the most part to have an even larger pool of options to choose from.
So I am starting off with NuraRay’s cave, you can get it here:
https://nuraray.web.app/mv-tilesets
First, since MZ basically treats the A5 and B passability the same and her set has a few things that I want need, I take her A5 and B set, remove all that I don’t need and make it one set.
Due to the different layer treatment in MV, nearly everything is more of less duplicate, so all that I want “extra” from A5 is the “deep wall”. I also decided that I didn’t want the glowing mushrooms and swirly things.
Another general tip: if you are 100% sure you don’t want to use a tile, remove it from your set! If you want to add it later on, you can, but it frees up space for things you really need and makes the tileset smaller and therefore easier to set up in the engine!
For me it also means I have as of now to work on one sheet less.
Here is the sheet, and if I was not able to recolor, I might swap the crystals in the house I mapped last time for blue ones (or declared black ones to be super rare) as in the tileset and ignore the stone color difference.
But I can, and so I am splitting my tile up into three layers: the crystal part, the cave/stone part and the “other part”.
With a combination of “select by color” and “box select” (adding and removing) I could pretty easily get all of the crystals onto a new layer since the division is very crisp in this set - which makes it a lot easier.
Now I could get everything “non-stone” with a simple box select as well and voila, others:
and the remaining stone:
You can do a lot of the editing with everything on the same layer, but I personally find it easier to have it clearly separated when that is possible.
First of all, I am copying a snippet of my own wall over as a reference, just on an extra layer over stone:
You can see how they are really just the same wall edited differently into a rounded cave wall.
Now the tricky thing is to figure out how to make them look the same, here I basically played around with the hue-saturation sliders until I was happy with the result - and then saved the preset (you can do so by pressing the + next to presets on the top of that window), since I will edit the other tiles from that set as well!
The result was already pretty nice, but a bit too red on some places.
So I created and saved a second preset, as you can see, I selected only the reds on the color wheel and then actually really just tried around until I was happy:
Since I want to use them as a color reference and on this map anyways, here I pasted Candacis gatherable crystals onto the sheet - only the black crystals, cause that is what I am aiming for.
You can get them here:
https://forums.rpgmakerweb.com/threads/candacis-resources-for-mz.126137/
The base stone color kinda coincidentally already matches perfectly, so all I need to do is to recolor the layer with the blue crystals to fit the black ones!
For this, I first kinda roughly adjusted the saturation and hue to kinda match:
….adjusted the contrast with a color curve…
…and then adjusted (now only saturation was necessary) one final time:
I will do similar things for other recolors if I feel like the set needs them, I won’t describe them as detailed then, you know the drill now.
And with that I have a base for a cave that is all RTP style, but noone ever used in that shape and form - and it will be even more individual with further additions.
Since this is already a lot of stuff written out, rapid fire of the rest I did for the sheets!
1. snagged some stuff from my water cave set that I thought could work as is
2. Merged NuraRay’s C sheet with Candacis “Steppe” fence that looks really nice mapped around cliffs:
From that sheet I also used her bridges and cave entrances:
3. For funsies and variation I recolored and threw in a few of White patisserie’s crystals https://noir-et-blanc-patisserie.amebaownd.com/
4. Same vein, I added a few recolored bits from green pocket https://web.archive.org/web/20200125193619/https://nyancha.sakura.ne.jp/GreenPocket/
5. Since I used them on the outside as well, I added in dot iku’s amazing stones for the inside - and piled some up for the other side of the pile.
https://dot.iku4.com/マップチップ素材/露天風呂完成
I also made a quick pile by copy and pasting them onto each other and added some “darkness” since the rubble pile blocks the entrance on the outer map (see below) and functions as a barreer.
6. since I have the incident with all the dead miners, I added my own bone pile, you will see how I use this:
plus this RTP stone:
7. I recolored A4 with my saved settings from the B recolor, and recut the tops from B as an autotile version for some mapping shortcuts:
8. For Nura’s A1 and A2, I removed the “ground” from around the autotile so I could place it however I liked.
For that I filled the layer above the autotiles with one of the ground tiles:
And set the mode to “grain extract”, which then would result in this effect:
New layer from visible and now all I had to do was to select the grey area from the original layer, remove the other two tiles (since my one is universal now) and recolor to the crystal color (and the water on the other sheet) as the rest and do the same with the stone.
Therefore I quickly separated my result (select by color, since all the crystal is blue and the stone is grey that’s easy):
One recolored with the preset, one with the crystals as reference, done:
same as the water:
Now one thing left, I used all the ground tiles and gave them a “smooth” treatment for A2:
https://forums.rpgmakerweb.com/threads/smooth-autotiles-a-5-minute-hack-to-nice-transitions.99753/
And with that, those are my tiles (I will say, I might add smaller things or edit along the way as needed, if I add larger things, I will say so, otherwise, it happened like above):
And here are the additions that ended up on the set while I built the map and felt I was lacking them:
I fiddled something together that could work as “ramp down” since I had a lot of vertical differences in my map, that is what you see on top.
And then I edited a cave entrance to have vanishing railways in them so I could connect the mine cart lines among different maps. Therefore I pasted the railway tile over the entrance, erased the “excess” and then blended it in with a very soft black pencil.
I also muted the default MZ rope ladder’s colors a little to better fit my vibe and added it in so I could have something to climb up the walls that basically fit the wall snugly and didn’t protrude into the map.
Bonus: I made a simple vignette to use for flavour.
You can use a light plugin, if this was an actual game and not a test map I might consider it, but you can already get a neat effect by simply creating an overlay picture with a gradient from full transparency to black just right in the corner (here with a little offset) and adjust until you are happy.
Before:
After:
Plus a little bit of screen tint:
Tip: a nice vignette or overlay (like sunrays, leaves etc.) plus a matching screen tint can go a very long way to emulate the atmosphere you are looking for.
For this particular cave, I went with a dulled out tint since this is a mine that is literally dead. But getting closer to the maps that breached into the fire section I could amp up the red in my screen tint a little to build up the coming change.
Now for the actual map: I will make a pretty map, but not one that is realistic as a whole dungeon for a game.
I wouldn’t condense this dungeon on one map, have puzzles, more secrets, all the good stuff. But this is a tutorial not “design a giant dungeon”, so bear with me, okay? So this is just the entrance section of such a dungeon.
We have two fix points:
In the cellar of the house is the secret entrance the party will use, and there is the rubble blocked entrance that they will see from the other side on the inside.
Here I saved a WIP from the map so you can see how I started with a base:
Before I even started I knew what my entrance area was supposed to contain:
- a special room pretty close to the front, just something extra for a bit of flavour and lore
- the closed entrance on the right and the open entrance from the secret cellar room on the left, including a stairs to get on the same level as the mine
- I wanted to give the mine a flair of size and depth, so I added chasms
- I wanted a mine cart system that would continue on following maps, so I created a flat path on the left that would allow me to map something without having to build too extravagant bridges or curves (I mean… the cave just happened to be perfect for that system in this area). Thinking about how I would develop the dungeon further down, I envisioned a puzzle including the cars, and if I wanted to have the tracks, they’d have to connect the whole cave where possible - or be at least close enough so workers could come over and throw their finds in.
- Then I wanted a larger area where there was just a large-ish cavern, again to use vertical space to give the players a feeling of a large natural cave that man are just expanding to get to the precious crystals.
- As for my outer maps, you can still see how in the top right I start out with basic “sketches”, usually using the ground tiles, and then go in and carefully build the actual shape with the correct wall height. You can see how I at this stage already threw in a few height variations (which are consistent with the total wall height) on the bottom left area, but generally here I just try to create a base with no height errors and straight walls, which I can then later “break up” and “decorate”.
So, let’s have a look at my finished map and then do a little walkthrough!
Let us explore the thing through the lens of the player and add my blurb on my decisions:
Entering from the cellar, we can see a few materials Bremmer VIth has stored here, just a little rope and some of the crystals he mined for. Since this is not the official way in and coming from a cellar, it is narrow and a wall height total of 2 lower than the rest of the base ground.
While this IS a crystal mine, you will mostly see just a few in not very easy to reach places: this is the most frequented area that has been used the longest, the stuff that’s easy to get has been taken. I would ramp up the crystal amount in the newer explored sections in the back.
You can also see the “cart parking lot” including options to turn them around as needed.
Here you can also see two main elements why I built my own set: caves can be really difficult to fill up, so having ground variations, rounded walls and the ability to map several layers add visual variation without cluttering the map and add a less manufactured look.
The previous official entrance is blocked. While there is no actual teleport, this logically and visually connects the map with the village map and gives the player where they are in relation to the town they already know.
Here is my special room I planned at the front. I could imagine the workers proudly display this massive crystal as a motivation boost, basically making it a flashy entrance sight for them and visitors.
This is also where Bremmer VIth (remember, we are looking for him and the player wouldn’t have known that he was still using the mine until a few minutes ago) created a memorial place for his deceased comrades. Since his mine access was secret he could not bring their remains out, but he wanted to honor them in the most important place of the mine.
This is not spelled out as you can see, the player would pick up hints around the mine and get a brief summary, but this is basically a way to transport lore without walls of text.
Moving over the bridge, here you can see one of the “ramps down” in use. Other options would have been sideway stairs edits or a ladder that peaks over the edge in one place.
You can see that the mine cart takes an easy way if possible, the less curves, the better for the people building and using the tracks.
On the left you can see a glimpse of a “decorative” room that is not accessible. If you feel like you have too much void (you know, out of the walkable boundaries the black parts) on your forest or cave maps, you can sprinkle in visible but not accessible bits. Just don’t overdo it and don’t trick the player into thinking they can access it.
Here would the cart track connect to the next map, and the player could switch the maps here as well. I also added a little bit of water just because like I felt this section could use a little something.
Going into the large cavern, there is one last place where people were looking for crystals in this area and already built a ways to access them.
Both high up the walls and down the chasm:
The closed hole with the shovel could be decoration or something to interact with.
In the cavern is both another access to the next map, this time on a lower level (so either it connects to a lower section of the following map or to a separate one that is below it) and some inaccessible not yet made explorable section. Maybe miners thought there was nothing to find or they didn’t get there yet.
The last section is yet another option to leave the map.
In total I could have either connected 3 different maps to my entrance area or one or two with multiple leading to the same map, maybe in different areas.
This could also allow for puzzles and fun exploration!
Also: if this was an actual game, I could also make a second version of this map, after the mine was made public again, using a different screen tint (the workers brought live and lights), with a proper memorial, newly built ways to access areas and actual commotion and work going on!
So what is my general takeaway for dungeon maps (visually):
- I would always build my own tileset (out of existing material) to have the ability to have curved walls, ground variations and the tiles to map walkable layers into the cave. As you saw, just a few freebies and maybe an hour of cutting and editing (longer if you write a tutorial) go a long way! There is a middle ground between out of the box RTP editor map and all custom parallax, and for me, personally, this is the sweet spot. If this was an actual game I might have a few more more extensive edits for this map and as already stated worked with a light plugin, but generally, this level of mapping and editing is my sweet spot between looks and effort.
- Use height variations both for the walls (breaking them up with not accessible small platforms) and the walkable areas to give the map a “natural” shape and feeling.
- Use variations in the ground to add something “different” to see without overcluttering the cave. Yes, there are rocks and all that, but they are not everywhere.
- Think about how and why this cave has been used and how that reflects in the look of the cave. If you can, some visual storytelling can go a long way. For example: one a cave where the player goes to fight monsters there is an old campsite in the entrance area - including the corpse of someone who wanted to use it as a place to sleep. A ray of light coming through a hole in the cave, with some plants growing in this spot. Archaeological remains, nothing big, but maybe visual callbacks to ancient temples the players visit in other places.
Maybe I forgot something and edit this later, I am on page 44 of my file as of now (I know, mostly pictures, but still). I hope you enjoyed it and let me know what you think!