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I made a note to myself saying that the first thing I'd do when the Return of Talking Time Returns With A Vengeance is make a thread on world maps in video games. There's probably a Tumblr devoted to it somewhere and I'd imagine there was a site devoted to world maps in the pre-Facebook pre-Reddit days of the internet.
Dragon Quest III made a monkey out of me.
Here's Golden Sun. It's Earth all along with extra bits.
How about Actraiser's map? I think it has some scenic charm to it when you are scrolling along in-game, but perhaps it looks less interesting at this scale.
It's got all the major biomes/climate zones represented (although you kind of have to use your imagination for the jungle island).
I played through Golvellius: Valley of Doom (an SMS ""Zelda clone"") this week, making a map as I went along.
Playing the game this way definitely enhanced the experience for me. Every map square in the game world has one cave in it, and there was just something therapeutic to systematically finding all of them and making notes along the way. Moreover, since the whole world fits in this nice rectangle, I found satisfaction every time I ran against one of the edges of the map. ~pleasant dopamine hits~
It's a good game and I recommend it, if you're willing to put up with a couple obscure bits.
When I played through Metroid (NES), I made a map of the world. Replaying the game aand ising the map showed me that there are more mistakes than I thought.
I also drew maps of the dungeons in Phantasy Star. That was fun. When I'm in the mood, it's a nice extra exercise, and really adds to a game.
I played through Golvellius: Valley of Doom (an SMS ""Zelda clone"") this week, making a map as I went along.
Playing the game this way definitely enhanced the experience for me. Every map square in the game world has one cave in it, and there was just something therapeutic to systematically finding all of them and making notes along the way. Moreover, since the whole world fits in this nice rectangle, I found satisfaction every time I ran against one of the edges of the map. ~pleasant dopamine hits~
It's a good game and I recommend it, if you're willing to put up with a couple obscure bits.
I once tried this game, but found it clunky to play. Always wanted to give it another try, though, and reading about it being a rectangle sounds like the mapping should be fun.
Just one question: How much space would I need to leave myself from the starting point, so that I don't run out of space?
The map is 13 screens wide by 14 screens tall, and you start near the lower right corner.
I'll grant you that the game is a little clunky. Some of the enemy patterns feel like just a bit Too Much compared to your abilities (mostly the bats). Weirdly though, you have full 8-directional movement in boss battles, so they can be a bit easier to avoid ironically.
There are a couple points that do feel a legitimately obtuse (e.g. finding the second boss or finding the progression item to get to the fourth boss), so don't feel too bad if you need to reference a guide at some point.
Contributors to this thread may be interested in Carto, an upcoming indie game based around changing the layout of the game world by manipulating the map. There's a demo available on Steam for the next 24 hours or so as part of their Autumn Game Festival. I thought it was pretty charming. Here's a trailer:
Contributors to this thread may be interested in Carto, an upcoming indie game based around changing the layout of the game world by manipulating the map. There's a demo available on Steam for the next 24 hours or so as part of their Autumn Game Festival. I thought it was pretty charming. Here's a trailer:
tangentially related: Neo Atlas 1496 is almost definitely the best map-based game i've ever played. Endlessly fun to just say "no that's not what I want the world to look like" and end up with some wild pangaea flat earth
Over the past week I felt inspired to make a 1/8 scale map of the (very good) Metroid 1 total conversion Junkoid:
Mappers danidub and Ambureon have made several 1/8 scale maps of several Super Metroid hacks, so I figured that someone out there ought to put the same work into Metroid 1.
I made another map of a romhack, this time for Metroid 2:
In total I've made 14 hack maps in this approximate style this year (of varying sizes), and this one is by far my proudest work. Check 'em out on my website (link in the previous post).
Made a few more maps this past month or so, this time of Metroid 1 hacks (what a surprise):
Metroid: Reborn: A Call to Valor
This hack is interesting. The creator refactored the level format to be more space efficient, so he could add more screens to the game. Unfortunately, the gains from this method were less than simply pressing the "Expand ROM" button in Editroid. Nevertheless, I think it was quite the accomplishment, especially since it all fits in the original game's 128 KB.
Despite the hack not being compatible with any editors, I felt determined to make at least a map of it, even if it were in a simpler style than my usual. Thus, I made a map by hand:
Note: I occasionally used RAM Watch in the emulator to verify my position.
Then I made a rough version of it out of tiles:
Attentive viewers will notice from the color-coding that this map actually wraps around the edges of the world, both horizontally and vertically. This is the only M1 hack I've seen that does this extensively, due to it being fraught in the original game for complicated reasons (which the author appears to hack fixed).
Anyhow, this is what that map looks like unravelled:
And from there, the final result was just a matter of prettification and annotation:
Even though the author was never able to finish Tourian, I like how this one turned out.
Metroid Blue
This is a simple hack that the author threw together in a couple days. It's neither good nor bad. It just is.
I'm kinda indifferent to how this one turned out as well. It's not bad, but I don't find the structure of the world particularly pleasing to look at.
Metroid Confrontation_NES
This is a demake of Milton Guasti's pre-AM2R fangame of the same name (trailer).
For this map, I decided to fill in the gaps between rooms, since the areas seemed to lend themselves well to it. This was particularly difficult with Ridley's area, because that was all techbase with no natural rock to doodle with. I really, really like how this turned out.
For comparison, this is what the original game's map looks like:
gossamer is a hack I playtested for my buddy neen. It has extensive routing options, bizarre layer blending effects, higher gravity, lots of underwater segments, and weird progression. Opinions on it have been split, but I'm a big fan.
This is the first full-scale SM hack that I've mapped, and I really like how it turned out.
Super Madtroid
This was a joke hack that the author made in a single day. It features things such as invisible elevators, inaccessible areas, barely edited rooms, and broken door connections:
I made this map before the gossamer map above this, mostly as a proof of concept, and to see if I could make a viable workflow for this game (answer: yes).
Samus Goes to the Fridge to Get a Glass of Milk
I made this map on whim a couple weekends ago:
This got an order of magnitude more attention on Cohost than any other map I've posted there. Truly, the people love a good joke.
(Also, I determined that the GBA Metroids pose significantly more mapping issues than the previous games.)
1) Doors between rooms in Metroids 1-3 have to be aligned with each other. Fusion/ZM allow for doors to be placed arbitrarily in the source and destination rooms. This may require significant adaptation (either putting rooms off-grid or fudging them so they stay on grid). The larger the map, the bigger this issue is likely to be.
2) The smaller room size means they have smaller margins, which means I have to make the room borders skinnier to compensate (I don't like the borders covering up actual walls too much). The thinner style I chose for that map was a bit more annoying to draw.
3) I haven't worked out a simple workflow for ripping the collision mask yet (for tracing over). (I'm sure this'll be simple enough if bother looking for a solution.)
And, of course, every Metroid hack is capable of non-euclidean nonsense in the hands of a determined author.
