Overworld Exploration Implementations - Your thoughts?

[qpHalcy0n]

Well, if it's the bottom one then that sure is ambitious...you should help me out XD

[lelandbdean]

Sorry for all the confusion, guys.

Ok! By "overworld" I'm referring to the primary chunk of the game where the player can explore and travel.

In Skyrim, this is the game in any outdoor area, with buildings and dungeons being loaded and interacted with in separate segments (disregarding awesome mods that change this), and the great outdoors being loaded in seamless chunks of terrain.

In Minecraft, there are no separate segments, ONLY seamless chunks of terrain. The only framing for an area versus another is inside the players' heads.

In Poke'mon, the overworld is similar to Skyrim's. It's any outdoor area. The overworld is here designed to be seamless if you piece it together (which is a nice touch, though strictly visual), but in gameplay it is split into many arbitrarily-sized segments with exit areas. The seamlessness is only artistic from the player's perspective.

Secret of Mana is similar to this, but its levels don't bother with artistic seamlessness (regarding adjacent areas) or similar sizing. Each area can be sized arbitrarily with no transition elements from area to area, but it looks and plays great when properly done (although, I always hated that there's an out-of-place teleport leading toward the witch's castle).

When I refer to a Zelda-type overworld, I'm referring to the types of maps in the 2d zelda titles, where a map chunk is screen-sized and you're either viewing one chunk or another (no scrolling except for special areas). This is most apparent in Zelda dungeons, but the overworld is designed to appear seamless in form despite the discrete segments of actual gameplay. The overworld is similar to Poke'mon, except the size and shape of each area is much more restricted.

The "condensed world map" variety has already been explained, but I want to clarify that I separate this type from the "click this spot on the map and go there" type, as travel and exploration are essential components of the experience, even if the world map is crunched into a more manageable size.

Sorry for the scattered post, in a rush at the moment!


***Also, just to clarify, the project I'm working on is 2D with a focus on lore, combat, and characters. My problem currently is picking the overworld implementation that best facilitates the feelings I want players to develop in gameplay--curiosity about the game world, the need to explore and learn, and the ability to fight things without having their buzz killed by the world design.***

[Falco Girgis]

^ Yes, I agree with this.

I don't think we should be drawing a distinction between 2D and 3D, especially since this topic seems to be open to either. This is more of a gameplay discussion, not a rendering/implementation discussion. Whether the camera allows you to see the horizon or not in a 3D engine is independent of whether maps are constructed seamlessly or not when you zoom out and look at the big picture.

In Poke'mon, the overworld is similar to Skyrim's. It's any outdoor area. The overworld is here designed to be seamless if you piece it together (which is a nice touch, though strictly visual), but in gameplay it is split into many arbitrarily-sized segments with exit areas. The seamlessness is only artistic from the player's perspective.

Fair enough. The world of Poke'mon is "seamless," as with Skykrim if you look at the map, but Zelda-style camera transitions/warps still exist when moving between certain areas. If we are strictly speaking about the map, they are the same. If you are speaking about map+camera, they are different.

Secret of Mana is similar to this, but its levels don't bother with artistic seamlessness (regarding adjacent areas) or similar sizing. Each area can be sized arbitrarily with no transition elements from area to area, but it looks and plays great when properly done (although, I always hated that there's an out-of-place teleport leading toward the witch's castle).

Right, this is definitely true.

The downside of this is that if the teleports/warps connecting the maps are not constructed with care, you can really break the flow of the world... Earthbound (SNES) especially is a good example of this. You could enter a warp into a building or another area from the right, then exit from the right in the same direction that you entered. Not only did this seem to break the continuity of the world for me, but I would keep holding the DPAD to the left sometimes, and exit as soon as I entered... That pisses me off so badly.

Despite the fact that you can really fuck this up with bad level design, I really feel like this style of map can shine above any other when you do it correctly. The upside is that you have far more freedom with the geometric structures of your map.

Take a look at any Poke'mon-esque map:

Since it is all contiguous, you have to create seamless terrain that connects everything to everything. You can't just throw in cliffs or mountainous structures that are irregularly shaped. You have no control over how a particular area is structured in the big picture. This results in terrain that I believe is less interesting to explore, more sparesly populated, and more areas that are "just there" to connect point A to point B without having anything interesting in them...

Take a look at the complexity of the terrain and map geometry of a Chrono Trigger-esque map:

Unfortunately Chrono Trigger does have an overworld, and that breaks the fluidity of the overall game, but once you have entered a region, they have full control over how each area is structured. This results in a wider range of map shapes and sizes, and far more interesting terrain, as it does not have to fit seamlessly into some gigantic overworld structure...

Another thing to note is asset management. In a game like Poke'mon, they pretty much use one tilesheet for the entire map. This results in very little terrain variety between areas of the game. It gets pretty boring. In a game like Chrono Trigger, where each area has its own set of assets, there is faaar more variety and detail put into each individual location.

Yes, you can definitely stream assets in a seamless environment for more variation, but that's another large level of complexity that your map system will have to handle.

[lelandbdean]

After all the discussion and thinking about what will best fit the gameplay experience I want to achieve, I think I've settled on using a Secret of Mana-/Chrono Trigger-style map implementation for the game world, but also keeping a limited hub level/base of operations structure in place to prevent some monotonous travel late in the game.

This will allow me to shape the game's terrain and dungeons however I damn well please (within reason), and let me focus more on the important content rather than whether or not the trees in two adjacent spots are aligned properly. Not only that, but I'll be able to keep combat nicely segmented while still giving the player room to breathe and maneuver.

This style of game world also allows much simpler control over the mood of individual areas, and makes transitions to both cutscenes and flight sequences smoother to drop in, which is the kind of versatility I've been trying to find.

Thanks for giving so much feedback, everyone!