![]() If you use a cut-off floor style, keep it. If you remove shadows, do it all the time. Did you miss some shift-click mapping? Are all the shadows correct? No cut-off mapping errors? If so, you’re done! Things to remember: -Keep a consistent style. When everything’s done, step back and revise the result. Counters and a few items in a shop, beds in a room, statues, etc. When you’ve placed your A tiles (walls and floors) place the focus points of each area. If you’re lacking specific resources, try to get them now or use a placeholder and find them later (say you need a certain style of statue/column/furniture you don’t have on the tileset, just slap a generic column in there and switch it with the real tile later). Just make sure you don’t break the internal rules of your game’s world. If you’re having trouble filling space you can always make up excuses to put stuff in the area. Of course remember you’re making a game and it doesn’t have to be 100% realistic. It makes no sense to put cupboards full of bread and wine in a smithy, and a bar won’t be displaying jewellery. What tiles are you going to be using for the walls and floor? Do they match? Do they fit the setting and tone your game has? You wouldn’t put a fancy rug in a very poor house, and you wouldn’t use a ragged stone wall on a fancy manor. Step 3: Style and primary features Time to choose what to use. On the far top of the map we’ll put the altar with statues, and at the sides we’ll put a couple of counters and shops (because it’s selling its talismans, or whatever). For the example, we’ll map the main room in the first floor of the temple. If the map looks too big and empty, consider splitting the space or breaking the monotony with individual spaces (in the case of this example, smaller areas limited with walls and counters). It’s also the time to do a rough room division of the map if needed. Also remember to set up the space for the connections to other maps. For now what tiles you use exactly is not a concern. You can plop down temporary tiles in the map to see how it fills out and if it needs more or less space. Does it look to big/small for the setting you want? Adjust as needed. Take any suitable generic ground tile and make the shape of the room, then add the walls and limits. Step 2: Barebones structure With a rough idea of the zone’s distribution, it’s time to make an outline of the individual map. ![]() (I will only fully map one room, but this way you can see the room distribution and planning and how space would work around multiple floors.). We’ll make it a wide building with two floors and the central area longer than the rest. For the sake of this tutorial, I’ll make an interior map, a church. Depending on the map, plan on other floors too. With that in mind, set down a barebones of how the rooms are distributed and what is in each room. ![]() You can later modify this as needed, but it helps to know how to organize the maps and what direction to map towards. Now, what’s the point of the area? Is it a cutscene? A boss room? Is it only a glorified corridor to transfer to the next area? Is it a place where a secret npc/item/monster shows up? Does it NEED to have certain features or support some gimmick or puzzle? If it’s a complex area (more than one map) you’ll want to think of a rough idea of how they are connected. ![]() What are you going to be mapping? A city, a dungeon, fields? Each work differently, so it’s important you set on that first. Step 1: General setting plan Take a piece of paper. While I use the ACE engine and the RTP for the examples, any engine that uses an editor and a tileset should be the same (heck, you can probably apply this to parallaxing too). I’ll be assuming you know the mechanics of the editor (shift clicking, the shadow tool, etc). The answer is being practical, using the editor, and practice. Some people asked me the typical “How do you do it?” or commented “You’re fast”. ![]() I’ve mapped and mapped and mapped, and not for myself (to me it’s harder to laze about when it’s something for other people) and I’ve grown somewhat confident in my mapping skills. So, since lately I’ve been doing nothing but mapping (what with the writing muses being on vacation). ![]()
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