I’ve been working on a project for a while now. And the hardest part for me has always been… well maps.
I find other aspects not terribly difficult, character creation, writing ect, but maps stump. As a one man team rn I don’t particularly have someone skilled at it
Anyone have resources/advice to help create maps a bit easier?
I’ve mainly been using existing maps as references and then changing them up. Enemy placement on the map is also a struggle.
This was my set of comments the last time a similar topic came up. Personally, I always try to go into a map with a focus in mind - trying to just randomly toss stuff down and make something stick frequently doesn’t work for me. Even if it’s a rough, “placeholder” set of ideas for features on a map, I try to at least have something lined up, because it makes a map feel more well constructed and a tighter experience in flow, IMO.
It obviously helps to have the map also reflect what’s going on in the story as well - if it’s a climactic moment, then having a map fit that feel should be an objective in mind in its creation too. In terms of resources on how to create maps easier, like I said in the comments above, doing a little preliminary sketch to get down an idea and get some rough dimensions will help with the planning. Alternatively, you can always load up Yeti’s FEMapCreator and just have it generate random maps until you get some features that call out to you, locking them in and then continuing to generate until you get kind of a “base” that you could use as a template to construct something entirely from the ground up.
I also really like to do maps “as practice”, adapting images or chapters from other FE titles and converting them to GBA representations (using different tilesets, changing features and adding gameplay mechanics - see my recreations of Chapter 6 from FE9 and Chapter 24x from FE5 in my thread) - it’s a nice challenge to replicate the maps and features and think of ways to change the gameplay as you’re making changes to the elements of those maps and designs.
In terms of enemy placement, I think having a good plan in mind for the flow of a chapter would also assist with that, as you’ll have an idea of “bosses here, enemies in these places to act as an impediment for the player, etc.”. Trying to just randomly place enemies probably will make the flow not as smooth as having something more tailored in mind.
I’m far from an expert when it comes to maps, but i’ve been told mine look pretty good, so i’ll give an amateurs advice:
When i make a map i try to first think of the location the map will be in. Is it a forrest? A crowded city? a mythical dungeon hidden deep inside a cave?
After that you should think of what the current situation is. Are you being ambushed at night? Deep inside a massive battlefield? A small squad searching for treasure? On a mission to assassinate the archduke? What is your goal?
Next i try to think about how the location would realistically look like. Let’s say your location is a settlement with a castle and a small town, and your “goal” is that your army is being ambushed by unknown forces at night while resting.
Think of this settlement not just as some random set piece for that one chapter, think of it as an organic place in your world.
The castle probably has a lord who looks over it, maybe he ordered a hit on you, or betrayed you? Now you can place soldiers coming from the castle towards you, and you have an “end point” of sorts. Maybe the Lord instead is a nice dude and helps you out instead.
What is the village like? If people actually tried to live there, what would they work as to earn their living? Maybe the village’s economy relies on Woodcutting and thus you have many forrest tiles nearby (you could place a house near the forrest, where the lumberjacks live).
Maybe the settlement is on an island, so it would make sense that the village relies on fishing to feed itself.
Or maybe it’s situated far up north, and the only real way to earn a living is mercenary work.
Small details. Let’s say your village has a smithy/armory. Villagers would often walk the quickest route there if they needed metal supplies like those hoove guards for horses, or tools, so the ground would eventually look more walked over than other areas.
Unit placement wise, try to approximately place units where it makes sense for them to be, if your party just arrived on the map, and a battle is already unfolding, it makes sense for them to be at the edge, compared to an ambush which sojld probably be in the middle.
Regarding exact enemy location: Do not worry too much about the exact positions for the first drafts of the map, just make sure the approximate location feels right, and adjust after playtesting.
To summarise, flesh out the idea and scenario that happens on the map first, think of it as if it was a real world location which the player just happens to be at, and then make the map as if you were just porting an actual location into a game.
That looks like a good size for an early chapter, actually!
It has a nice few points to focus player behaviour, such as the initial forest choke and enemy pattern, then the curve near the village towards the fort.
I would personally add a bit of cliff between the two to give the player’s flow something to engage with. There’s a lot of vacant space past this point where the player will just be moving through without much interaction (although the Dragon Rider will be an imposing feature here).
Celice has the right of it on this one, I think. The size seems pretty good to me - you could maybe even trim like a row and like a column or two to clamp down on the “dead space” in the middle, though you just as much could fiddle with the layout of the area as well. Instead of having the cluster of trees right across the bridge, the trees could be spread out a little more to adjust the units’ paths through the vertical stretch to the north of it, you could add cliffs to further tweak the flow and pathing through there (if the player has to do an “S” to maneuver through, then they could be ripe prey for the Wyvern to swoosh in and initiate combat against them while they’re ‘stuck’ in the middle, etc.), and so on.
The other thing that really ‘stood out’ to me is kind of the ‘boxiness’ of the layout at present - things that are manmade can often be more square in orientation, though nature is often a little less prone to that, so you could vary up the visual detail of the map by making the river/stream not as straight (assuming it was naturally formed and not dug out by man), you could add less geometric patches of brighter grass or dirt paths, could make the mountains not as square, etc.
For example, here’s a map that I made for a project (i.e. not free to use), but it should kind of showcase the general idea of the tree placement, the curving flow throughout the map with features like cliffs, the non-geometric patches of dirt and grass, etc. Hopefully something useful to reference and study.
My plan is to make a few maps by myself till I get a 5ish chapter beta out there. Hopefully that encourage some people to help me out. A lil team haha.
So I def wanna make the first few maps good! Thank you for the tips
Everybody’s given solid advice, but I want to mention the importance of tools the player has access to when fighting enemies/traversing the map. Think of mounted units on a large, plain-filled map or bow users on maps with a lot of fliers. It also might be good to have new recruits perform well on the map they join on, like having a mage join on a map with a lot of high defense armor units.
As for enemy placements, it might help to think of maps in “chunks” that you can break up. So in your map, the starting area is the 2 knights+healer followed by a fighter/archer combo, then the fighter/wyvern/cavalier, ending with the boss and the two fighters.
Remember to incorporate enemy AI into the design too (Charge immediately, charge after 1 turn, move if foe is in range, move if foe is within 2 turns of movement, etc.). Placing enemies in groups, like a group of cavaliers that move simultaneously on the 2nd turn or a fighter/myrmidon/archer trio that protects the archer are simple additions that require just enough thought for the player without overwhelming them early on in the game.
