Slice of Venture Remake Diary #4 (Pixiv Fanbox)

Hello everyone,

Here comes the dreadful posts about mapping :x

Don't worry, it won't hurt...

As I said before I'll be dividing them in two posts. In that first post I'll explain you the sort of difficulties/frustrations I have to face about mapping with what is probably the most relevant example I ever had since I started working on RPG Maker. In the second post, I'll just show you the different new maps of the game (including a couple of new places ;)

This is something I've always said at the beginning of a game development or when I needed to create new content in a game, but mapping isn't something as obvious as it looks. First of all, I'd like to mention that while I've been very critical about the H games I've played through the last year, there's one thing a good amount of those games do better than me, it's mapping. I knew I wasn't very good at mapping, but now I know it's one of my biggest weaknesses ^^' So I tend to compensate with good looking map elements rather than interesting level design. For example, here in SoVR I created my own tilesets for many maps, carefully taking elements from the range of tilesets I had available to compile them into the most relevant ones I could make so that each element would be useful. But that's not the subject...

Basically, the major problem when it comes to mapping is graphical coherence. I know some people don't care (hell some people even have different artists for a single game 8D), but personally, I find that having graphical styles that are too different inside a map can ruin the immersion. Because of that, I've always been kinda bound to use stuff that was close enough to the original RPG Maker style. Everything that is too 8-bit looking doesn't work, for example.

Except that during the time I worked on TH2, a tileset came out on sale that I immediately bought because it was EXACTLY what I wanted for SoVR. It's a set of tiles for Japanese towns. The style is pretty different from the original RPG Maker tiles, but in this case, since it's a full set (so Tiles A1 to A5 + B to D), I would've been able to build the Marakoma maps as I wanted without having to use any tile from the original set. I expected that if the graphical difference was between different maps, it was an okay situation. Because after all, there aren't many Japanese element in the base RPG Maker set so it's a bit hard to make thing REALLY Japanese looking without taking the direction of Shrines and stuff like that (the most Japanese looking place in SoV2 IS the shrine and certainly not the convini nor the park...)

To be honest, I was eager as hell to use that set. I'd finally have a Japanese-looking town! And then I tested it... And I died a little inside. I made a specific series of screenshot to show you the problems.

Here are a couple of buildings that can be made with those tiles. As you can see it's varied (and it's only a couple of them.) Office-looking stuff, houses, restaurants, appartments, station... Everything you'd need.

On the right side I put a couple of random elements that are needed for the next screenshot. You'll understand where I'm going.

Now we have the characters appearing on those tiles. Nothing strikes you? There should be. Yuki is taller than the whole first floor of that building. Anaëlle is almost as tall as a tunnel for train and Ayame is almost as wide as a car... At some point coherence isn't JUST about graphics it's also about proportions. As you can guess, Seiichi would be almost 1/3rd higher than this vending machine. Anyone who went to Japan even once knows that to be taller than those you have to be taller than 2 meters... That's stupid...

And the worse is that those building tiles are crafted to be used ONLY as two rows. I can make them as wide as I want, but not higher than two rows. Meaning I can't even cheat by making them 3 rows high to compensate (like you can do with usual building tiles in RPG Maker.)

To insist on the difference of look, I made a comparison pic with the farm house.

On the left you have a 2x3 block supposed to show 6 appartments, on the right you have a 11x4 block for a single house. I mean, I can accept it in the case of them being on different maps, but it's just TOO big of a difference... Shrinking the charsets would be the idea, but then they'd look stupidly small in all other maps of the game. So basically, this set, in that current state, is just completely unusable and I had to do everything without it. It's not even the loss of money that pains me (because who knows, I might be able to use it one day in another game), but looking forward so much to have a good Japanese-looking town and have my hopes thrown away like that -_- So I apologize, you won't have something as good as it could have been...

Some of you might think "Then this set is completely useless if characters don't have the right proportions!" and it's not completely true. If most Japanese H game makers are better than me when it comes to mapping, when it comes to pixel characters I own most of them. They almost ALL use the base look of RPG Maker MV/MZ characters.

And when your character is an SD character, it's completely different. Your character DOESN'T have the right proportions. At this point you clearly declare that your game isn't meant to follow proportions, so if things aren't proportional in the rest of the game it's not a problem for immersion. It doesn't break the suspension of disbelief. But in my games, the characters have more or less normal proportions, so it doesn't work.

That's all I wanted to talk about in that post. I know it won't interest the majority of you and I also know that a good amount of people wouldn't have minded if I had kept those tiles to build the maps of Marakoma. But that's me... It's not just H scenes, I tend to do everything the way I'd like to enjoy things if I was a player. And that would have been something I'd have disliked as a player so I'm not doing it ^^'

It doesn't mean the final result will be shit, don't worry. I'll show you in the next post some of the different maps of the game with their original counterpart to explain some of my choices as well as a couple of new places (because yes, I'm going to spoil some things about that first version :x)

I'll see you next time! o/