Making a map II

じ☆ve冰风

This is more a "how I would do this" instead of a general tutorial. I will make a map, and on the process, explain myself to you and try to leave some handy tips.
This is also a continuation of Making a map, so please read that one first.

In the previous tutorial, I made a mountain hideout and build a tileset base for the exterior of that region.
Today I will build on that and make a small village in the same area.

Before I start, there are some things I need to set straight for myself:
What do the people in this area do for a living? Are there many travellers?
This is a huge question. The whole look of the village depends on it. Is a run down collection of houses in the middle of nowhere where people are disconnected from everything? Is there a well frequented route through it, that brings in salespeople, gives a reason for shops and inns to exist and therefore creates a lot of revenue?
What faction does my village belong to? Maybe that is visible in a way?
What materials are even avaiable to the people?

All the answers to these questions will afflict my tileset, and will shape the look of the map.

So, my fictional town, let's call it:
Bremmersville, named after the founder who, as the legend says, on a stroll through the moutains found a giant gem here. He would use the funds from selling it get the materials and workers to build the mine.
Sadly, the mine collapsed many years ago, and the town once buzzing and wealthy, is now just a little random mountain village.
They are mostly self-sufficient, herding lifestock on the mountainy grasslands and hunting some rare wild animals to trade in their fur for the things they can't produce on their own.
Therefore there are some trading connections, but nothing major.
But since my heroes pass through it on the way to the hideout I mapped in the last part, maybe some people are aware of that...

So, you might wonder: what are you talking about, you wanted to make a map, not talk about lore.

But see:
With that in mind, I know:
- not too many people live in this place, and for their farming lifestyle, I might want to add some stables and lifestock
- I have a good backstory for the inn, I can even make a larger building and have the owner talk about the past glorious days
- due to the little trading the village has, I can add a travelling salesman to the inn, who has random stuff the party needs, and who is here because he supplies the village in trade of fur
- that means, I might not have local shops, as said, people are very self sufficient here and the farmers just may trade as needed with each other... maybe some people just sell some of their produced goods at their homes though
- It also means, the houses are not very fancy and the people don't have the "leftover" money for fancy decorations. Everything should be clean and sturdy.
- besides, it gives me tons of options for sidequests... the son of a local woman who went to the mountains to see if he can find a new mining place and has not come back, the farmer who's precious bull escaped, the mayor who wants the heroes to find a way to unblock the mine with their legendary skills... and more connected to my main plot, maybe I need to find the one who trades with the people in the hideout, maybe there is a traitor in the village that I need to find. The options to fill this place with characters with motives and intentions are limitless and created a lot of interaction and quest potential.

From all this, I get a list of stuff to add to my tileset, that I can carry over from my last map:

• I need an A3 that suits the style I am going for
  
• I could do with a large and blocked mine entrance
  
• I need all the basic house stuff, maybe roof variations, but for sure windows and fences...
  

Let's start with the basic houses.
Candacis has great house additions in her MZ thread, and fences. I will use those as base.
I also like her choices for the walls and the recolors, although:



I would rather have the brown frames for the windows, I will get them out of a different version of the tileset.
We are up in the mountains, I don't plan to use the brick wall and the slate roof, as in my lore they don't have slate there and with the trees and stone avaiable, I don't see them making bricks. So that means even though I use this sheet as base, I throw out and edit a lot of stuff before I proceed.
So with 10 minutes of dedicated crop and pasting, deleting and adding stuff from other sets by Candacis, I end up with this:

Tip: I marked my empty slots here. This is for 2 reasons: When I need to add more stuff, I can easily see, where on the sheet is still room left. I also won't map with those now empty tiles that way, because otherwise I might accidentially use them and when I later add stuff into them, they might randomly appear on older maps...



I will for sure add more stuff that I realise I need in the process, but what is done is done ;3

So, luckily she has the matching A3 se as well, and again, there is plenty of stuff I won't use for sure.



I have my two roofs and two walls, and I made an easy combined edit for more variation. If I was going for a larger village, I might consider even more versions, maybe with vertical boards and so on. And of each roof I made a "narrow edit", which will allow me to map like this without further issues:




All I am missing is some basic crops and decoration, which I will likely gather during the mapping process. I just add Cyanides what autotile into my A2 here as well.

Oh, and the mining entrance, there I will use my own large cave entrance and block it off with stones by dot iku.

And with that, I finally start with sketching out my map:



I roughly see if I have room for enough houses and can add in at least some pasture and crops.
Therefore I map some dummy houses and try to give them all enough space, but also to keep the ways short enough.
I drew in the flat areas that I need and will now first create the backbone of the map - the mountains where everything is built and grown on.
With that backbone of the map done, it looks like this:



You can see that I made sure everything is accessible and I used the pasture (which will get fences around), the mountains, the mountains and the crops as natural border. The grains will be unpassable, since my heroes are not supposed to ruin the people's food. That way the players get the illusion that there is more room occupied by the village off screen and because I basically used anything as border it does natural and not like some weirdo stacked up tons of crates in the front of what should be a road.

And like a painting, I use this landscape with the sketched in houses as a canvas I refine it until I am satisfied.

So, I will now take you on a little tour through the town, where I want to talk about the thoughts and decisions that went into each snippet.




The map is entered from the bottom, and I kinda embraced the ideas the setting and style that I already created on the other map.
In my choice of plants and rocks and even in the way the grounds are marbeled into each other to show that there are some dirt patches on otherwise rocky terrain.
The people here are for example keeping sheep, that tiny little building on the left is a stable, and "out of the picture" would be their pasture.
You can also see a cat strolling through the down, and that insead of a well, the town sports a central pond for watering.

I tried to keep everything interesting without overloading it. There is enough room to walk, but still a clear indication where to go, there are no large enterable empty patches.




The other bottom natural border are the grain fields. Here I spotted the chance to have an NPC outdoors, as there is not so much outdoor space for NPCs otherwise.
You can also see three things that I had to recolor:
The door was too saturated, the bench had a different contrast, saturation and hue and as you have seen in the sketch, the grain was very bright before.
For the wooden things I used the houses as guideline, for the grains the strawpile by Maru that I used on another part of the map.
You can again see that patchy ground look, where on some areas stuff can grow and on others there is no or not enough soil.




This house has a sideway entrance, the path basically shows where the door would be.
Mixing a few of those in can help breaking up the look of a town. Even if you go for all boxy houses, turning a few will help a lot!
Here you can also see the "narrow" A3 wall in action, the few less pixels on the sides turn it from a shoebox into an actual house.
You can also see that the former mine is still a central piece of the town, as said, it was built around it.




Here you can see again how I only used two base walls + the edit of both and by mixing them and using my width variations and the details candacis set had I can create buildings that look like they belong to the same region but not all the same.
One house has some flowers, one is a windowless shed or stable and one is a little more narrow but tall.
The stairs are pretty wide, having in mind that in the past there would be some transportation of mined stuff going on.




Finishing at the inn. The travellers would place their horses in a stable in front of the town, since the stairs are a little steep for them. But now that not many people come here, the inn is too large for the town. The sturdy brick building has seen better days, but it is still well kept and the owner even put some flowers on the window.

As you can see, I have plenty of room to fill the town with interiors and extra life.

And as always: testplay your maps! Your players will never see the large mapshot, they will always only see a screenshot at a time ;3




Credits for the used resources (nearly everything is on the forums): Venere Marte, Candacis, Cyanide, Avery, PandaMaru, Crazy_Leen, Dot Iku, NuraRay


本贴来自国际rpgmaker官方论坛作者:Avery处,因国际论坛即将永久关站,为了存档多年珍贵资料,署名转载到本论坛存档,由于官方帖子为英文原帖，需要中文翻译请点击论坛顶部切换语言为中文就可以将帖子翻译成中文浏览,方便大家随时查看,原文地址：https://forums.rpgmakerweb.com/threads/making-a-map-ii.155371/