World Mapping

I made a breakthrough the other day on some of the background and plot details for a significant dramatic turn in my RPG that occurs later in the game, past where I've done most of my work so far. I got some great dialogue written down for a confrontation that I'm really excited about. I wish I could finish working on this game already so I could show it to you. But it's a behemoth of a project. I'm finding that, as much as I can piece together some pretty neat maps, it's such a task and a chore, and more often than not it's the thing that's holding me back from making faster progress on my game. Simply put, I wish I could hire a mapper - somebody to take leads from me, but with a talent (and more of an enjoyment, rather than dread), for putting together game worlds of this sort. But, there's no point in wasting time complaining - I just gotta get it done, like it or not.

And on that subject, I've been thinking about world maps lately. I really want to put my world map together. I have a pretty strong idea of everything I want to be on there (even if I haven't mapped out the interiors of all the towns and dungeons yet), but it's such a colossal task, putting a whole world together, tile by tile. I can't decide whether it'd be better to work top-down as my instinct suggests (i.e., get a general idea of where everything sits and then fill in the details), or from the bottom up, piecing some tiles together here and there and seeing where they end up fitting together (not really my style). But one of the problems is that I'm not 100% sure where I want everything to go, especially in relation to everything else. I've sketched out the different areas - call them "countries" - on paper several times, and shuffled them around. But some of the game details, like how you get from A to B, and when you need to have access to C, will affect where things should be placed, and I guess I'm still not 100% confident about all of that.

Still, I've come to the realization that you can't expect yourself to be good at something the first time you've ever done it. And mapping is one thing, but creating world maps provides its own unique challenges. So I've decided that I should start out by practicing putting some world maps together, using some of the maps from the very games that serve as my primary inspiration (i.e., classic, 2D VG RPGs such as Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest/Warrior). At this point, it's just a copy job, so I'm not getting any practice using my creativity and imagination, but it's like starting out learning guitar by playing other people's songs. And copying huge 256 tile square maps is a daunting task (although I find it strangely relaxing - I could go in a trance and map like this for hours). But I think that digging in and getting my hands into the nitty gritty, examining these maps literally tile by tile, and seeing how the experts do it, will help me to build something of a muscle memory, and hone my instincts on what works well and what doesn't. So that when it comes time to design my own world map, it won't feel so much like I'm jumping out of a plane without a parachute.

So here's what I've completed so far, using RPG Maker MV's native tiles. Fans of the real old school RPGs will surely recognize them (hint, they're from games I've already reviewed right here on this blog). I haven't decided yet whether I'm going to do more or leave it at that (it takes a lot of time, but then I've drawn lots of inspiration from the SNES-era Final Fantasies, and they have some great world maps - especially FFV). It's tempting to just copy these games start to finish, because I love them so much, but while that would be good practice for putting an RPG together, it would be kind of pointless, as those games already exist... Ah well. here's this:

Can you name these worlds? :-3