2368: Building a World… Again

Playing with RPG Maker MV as I am at the moment, I’m reminded of quite how much I enjoy building worlds. I don’t have the skill or technical knowledge to be able to do so using 3D modelling tools (or even level editors for 3D games) but I’ve always felt I can put together some interesting 2D maps for RPGs.

There are two main approaches you can take when building a world for a game. You can take the “realistic” approach and attempt to build it to something approaching a believable scale, or you can take the “gamey” approach and try to build something that works well in the context of a game.

In actual fact, I tend to find that the best approach is somewhere between the two. A certain degree of game design is necessary when building a world in order to prevent it feeling like an unfocused mess — many modern open-world games fail miserably at this — while at the same time if your world design is completely divorced from reality your players will constantly be aware that they are playing a game rather than immersing themselves in your fictional world.

This isn’t always a bad thing, of course. Some people very much prefer exploring something that has been crafted to be fun, interesting to explore and well-paced. Others, meanwhile, like to wander off the path at every opportunity and see what’s in that cave, over that hill, behind that locked door. And some of the most satisfying gaming experiences I’ve had have come in environments very obviously designed to defy all real-world logic (not to mention architectural principles and, well, physics) — Metroidvania-style titles particularly spring to mind in this regard.

Since the game I’m playing around with at the moment is a kind of grand experiment of sorts, I’m going to play around with a variety of different approaches. The concept of the game sees the party travelling to several different “worlds”, so each of them are going to be structured differently. One of them will be a condensed fantasy RPG-style world, with the distinction between “overworld” and “dungeons”. Another will be one big dungeon — probably a haunted mansion or something along those lines. Besides those, I’d like to do something interesting with a sci-fi/cyberpunk feel, and either something completely abstract or very much grounded in reality. Or perhaps both.

Unlike past projects, where I’ve sort of “winged it” as I’ve gone along, this time around I’m actually taking a bit of time to plan things out to a certain degree. I imagine there will still be an element of winging it as I play around and think of new things I’d like to do, but at the very least I intend to plan out the basic structure and/or map of each of these “worlds” and how the player will interact with them. Then it will be interesting to see how much of a challenge it is to implement each of them using the RPG Maker MV toolset.

So far, the game’s introduction has a single, linear “dungeon” to introduce the player to the basic concepts. After that, I intend to allow them to choose how they progress through the initial phases of the game — though I also intend to put in some systems to ensure some jumping back and forth between the different worlds and their corresponding styles is in order. Should keep things interesting. We’ll see, I guess.