Update 11/25/2015Today I created a small town map where the player will begin his adventure and where there will be multiple side quests. Here's a breakdown of the design process:
1) At first, I struggled with the map, trying to figure out what to make. Then I realized that I wasn't sure what purpose the map was going to serve, so I opened up Notepad and said, "What purpose do I want this town to serve?", and started writing. I asked a few other questions, such as "what buildings will I need for this town?", "what is this town's backstory?", and "how will this town be mapped out?". I found that asking a few creative questions really helped me figure out where I wanted to go with this.
2) For the map, I decided to divide it into four areas. I started with a normal 17X13 tile map:
Once I got this area filled in, I doubled the width to make this:
Finally, I doubled the length (that's what she said):
I was going to add more buildings, but I got lazy and filled it with trees and stuff instead:
3) I have found that this process of dividing a large map into smaller sections and working on those sections has made the map making process much more approachable.
CommentsIt seems quite old fashion for the art style, looks comfortable. I think the key of this game would be the story. Good luck, see what you can do. Smiley
Yes, RPG Maker's art style is meant to resemble the SNES era of JRPGs, which I really like. I will be focusing on the story more than anything else for this game. And thanks, I will see what I can do with this, at this point I'm just hoping to make a complete game.
good luck on your project
i recommend making your own GFX, youll get more out of the project in the end.
Best of luck with this! But I agree about changing the art. There are so many RPG Maker projects that use the stock assets that it will be nigh impossible to stand out if you ever want to make any plans to do something with this going forward. But either way do your best! :D
Thank you both for your comments. Although I would love to make custom art from scratch, I'm doing this game mainly as a learning exercise, so making my game look unique isn't so important to me. My main priority is to just make a complete game. I may try to update the graphics to something unique later on, but more likely I will hold out on that for the next game I work on.
I don't want to make this project overwhelming for me, which is one of the reasons why I chose RPG Maker; it abstracted away much of the work that is usually involved in making a game.
Thank you so much everyone for taking the time to leave a comment, that really means a lot to me (and wow, over 200 views already? You guys are awesome). :D
Community
