Discussion Creating your own region

[Marin]

It's saturday, so it's time for another weekly discussion! (yes i know last one was friday, still figuring out the best day to have these)

This week's topic: Creating your own region.

Most fangames create their very own region, but that can be long and painful process; not to mention the various iterations it will likely have.

• How do you plan out the layout of your cities, towns, routes, forests, caves, etc.? Do you first flesh out your story/story details, and then create a map based on that story? Do you find and reference an existing real-world area and model your region loosely off of it? Do you just try something and hope it works?
• Creating your own region is a step more abstract than mapping individual maps, and typically happens before doing so. That said, how do you ensure that your region layout doesn't feel repetitive, like having two mountain routes or cave areas right after one another? Do you plan out the content of your routes while creating your region map? What do you all take into account with your route placement and length?
• How do you balance the placement of towns and cities? Does your gym type lineup determine where cities and towns are (if applicable), or does that come through your region layout?

(also i saw last week that people were explicitly answering the questions posed here, but that's not too important; the goal of these questions is mainly to start a discussion, you don't need to perfectly answer everything)

 

[luxdiablo]

Some of these questions are rather interesting, so I figured I'd answer them. (I know that's not the point of the post but I just felt like it :p)

- Planning layout is honestly really subjective. There's no method to do it, it just has to make sense. Of course, you want to think about it from a game development perspective. Would it make sense to have a forest right next to an urban city? What would the atmosphere of the routes be? The most important thing when it comes to layout, at least for me, is that it flows naturally. People tend to mess this up with gates, where they think that they can conjoin two mismatched locations by using gates, which is simply not true.

- Repetition in maps is really easy to fix. It's super obvious when your routes and cities are starting to get repetitive and similar, and it's always nice to make sure that each major location has some sort of gimmick. For example, in my game, I have an urbanized city, which is its gimmick, and then it's followed by a populated trail route, sort of like a hiking trail. Then, the next city over is focused around a certain building, and you get the point. Gimmicks are a key to making your region feel less repetitive. In terms of content, I feel its better to start by planning your overall region map, as that will normally tell you which direction your routes and cities go, and where they're located.

- For this, you could go the typical route and do City 1 -> Route 1 -> City 2 -> Route 2, but that's no fun. You can balance your towns/cities by creating connecting paths, like how in Kalos, Victory Road is very close to the earlier cities of the game. Stuff like this makes your region feel more balanced and natural. For me personally, gym lineup is a bit of a mix. One example I can give is off my Water Gym-Leader, who is dressed like a navy soldier. To solidify this, his city a port town, and is very important in economics. Naturally, it'd be close to an ocean. However, this may not apply to every gym leader. For example, my fire gym-leader is based on Bikers, and the biker aesthetic. However, her city is just dab-smack in the middle of nowhere, with no real relation to her theme. It's a bit of a mix of both.

 

[VanillaSunshine]

Oh, to wake up and be blessed with good h*cking content.

I won't lie, and will admit that I haven't made much progress on any of my projects... Except their regions!! So far, I've created two regions: a full-scale region fit with an entire 8-gym Pokémon League, and a small-scale region with only 5 towns and a forest.

The former was never intended to be a fan-game region; it was actually made for one of my Pokémon Original Characters (OCs), since his story only fit well if he came from a small non-canon region. His story (or, rather, the story he is a part of) is the plot that I wanted to tell in my original passion project of a fan-game... But I quickly understood that the type of story didn't fit well for a game, and was better left as a written experience. Despite that, I still hope to create a bit of a "walking simulator" of the region; I think Essentials will be a fantastic way of bringing this region to life in a familiar way, while also getting it out of my head and into a tangible representation.

Under this spoiler, I'll go into more detail about the process I went through for designing this first region, if anyone is interested!

Spoiler: Creating Mækid

Because this region was made for an OC and not for a game, my first draft of Mækid was simply a large-resolution drawing. I sketched it out in a digital drawing program, and then brought it into Photoshop to create a HGSS-inspired final product. Since it was intended to be the only representation of this region, I also labeled the towns and cities.

Here is a (bit large) image of the map. It's from October 2016! Wow!

Spoiler: Mækid's Original Form

If you take a look at the map, some of you might be able to instantly recognize it as Denmark!
The reason I chose Denmark for this region is a little bit convoluted given the reason I was making the region at all. The OC I mentioned earlier was written to be living in Kalos for his business, and I also made a point to write him as simply a generic white man, as opposed to the typical Japanese character I was prone to writing for Pokémon. It didn't feel right for him to be from America, so I didn't want him to be from Unova; I wanted him to be from somewhere in Europe, but not native to Kalos... And I also want him to be from an absolutely tiny country, perhaps smaller than the average European country, since that geographical scale felt "right" for a Pokémon region.
So, naturally, I chose Denmark because I like the flag and thought the word "Danish" sounded funny...

From there, I simply pulled up a map of Denmark, was roughly inspired by its landmasses and the cities marked (using Sinnoh's town & route count as a guide), cleverly made the League oriented where the capital city is, and started drawing lines until the routes made sense to me! I named the towns after species of Crow, because that OC I keep bringing up has a bit of a Crow/bird motif.

Oh, but then I got into fan games thanks to AtomicReactor's videos getting recommended to me, and of course my impressionable and creative personality went "WHAT IF I PUT MÆKID INTO A POKEMON GAME..." and oh, I put so much time into that little Gen 3 project. I even squashed down the Portrait-oriented map to be Landscape-oriented and then redrew the entire thing so I could fit it into Essentials!!
It even made the entire region look like a little bird!! Oh, no one will be ready for the day I start the trend of fan game walking simulators...

Spoiler: Mækid's In-Game Map

As a little treat, here is the (rather large) document where I planned the in-game progression of the region. This was before I realized I had no proper interest in making an 8-gym fan game and that my story wouldn't fit that format.

Spoiler: Planning Mækid

Blue numbers track the intended town progression.
Red numbers track the intended route progression.
Green is for roadblocks, to prevent the player from going too far in the wrong direction.
Magenta is places of interest.
And the tiny unreadable Cyan text is the gym progression, and the HM they give out.

Working with Mækid taught me that I h*cking love planning regions. Too bad none of this work will really come to fruition, and Mækid most likely won't see the light of day until I decide that I want to make a walking simulator in Essentials. Perhaps I'll mess around and map a few towns or routes whenever I'm particularly bored or burnt out on my actual project.

Speaking of my Actual Project, I just finished planning out my region for it the other day! It's a little scary that Marin seemed to know...

Spoiler: Creating the Unnamed Region

This project is at an extremely lesser scale than Mækid.
The entire region isn't implied to only be 5 towns, but for this project, the player is contained to a very specific story that doesn't need to take place outside of this range. Everything is oriented around the forest in the middle.

Here's a sneak peek at the Town Map: (Not how it appears in-game :3c)

(Can you tell I love drawing maps? They're so frustrating, but those mountains and shorelines make me so happy to look at!)

For this game, I chose to base the area around Mexico. (Specifically, my partner's favorite city in Mexico: Acapulco.)

My significant other is Latin, so I've been increasingly interested in Latin America and its countries and cultures; when I created the players and main NPCs for this project, it just came naturally for it to be implied for them to be in Latin America. I've written for a lot of characters in a lot of different countries and origins, from Japan, to South Korea, to the USA, and to various European countries; however, I've only recently begun writing characters from Mexico, so it feels awesome to immerse myself into learning about this chunk of the world that I never heard too much about.

The fact that the region is based on Mexico isn't very relevant to the story, just as Mækid being based on Denmark isn't relevant to it as a Pokémon region at all, but each Pokémon region's origin is quite important to me from a world-building perspective! Because of that, I tend to take their origins a little bit seriously.

The origin of a region is the basis on which I form everything about that region. For example, Kanto being based on, well, Kanto is extremely important to me. Sinnoh being based on Hokkaido is also extremely important to me, because that means Sinnoh's culture is vastly different from the cultures in Kanto, Johto, and Hoenn. It's never really relevant in Pokémon games, but it's an aspect of these places that makes them feel more real and believable to me, so it becomes important to me to take these things into consideration when I discuss Pokémon world-building as a whole.

So, when I planned both of my regions, I didn't really have any guidance or plans. I just thought about what was relevant to the characters/story, picked a country or part-of-a-country that I was interested in, pulled up a map, and worked with it from there! With Mækid, I didn't even plan it with game development in mind; I just brute-forced a logical game-path through my already-drawn map, and it worked itself out. With the Unnamed Region, I knew I wanted a very small game, so I naturally built a very small region for it.

As someone who does not like to "do things on the fly" and very much prefers to plan things out, it's kinda interesting that I prefer this method of region-planning! Though, I suppose it can be looked at from this perspective: the region map is just my plan/guide for how to map my towns and routes... I guess that explains why I got the Town Map for the Unnamed Region finished so early in development! If I start to encounter some horrible flow while mapping, I won't be too hesitant to edit up my Town Map, but that's a bridge that I'll cross if I get to it!

(I hope other people share their Town Maps this week too!!)

 

[Nomi]

Honestly, I just kinda create everything as I go. The maps and story are generally created at the same time, unless I have specific ideas for them beforehand. Right now, I've only mapped out a small portion of my region out, so I have a general idea as to what I want to do, but not too much as to not be overly ambitious. The way I balance areas is by figuring out what I, as a player, would be okay with. Having a giant route with no town nearby would suck, while having a tiny route between two routes would also suck, so it's mostly trial and error dfgdfgdfg

 

[Nota]

Thinking about it makes me think that either way goes. Making a map to fit your story in or make a story to fit in your map. Depending on the choice, at some points you'll need to edit the latter to follow. I think the story, while not being most of the work in a game, is the part to consider more important. It guides the events as they unfold and it has the themes of each location that those events happen.

For one, let's say you've finished creating your entire region's maps, yet you have no story. How would you know that a map needs to be in? How would you know the importance of a location?
Going through that route and assuming you're a fan of making evil teams, you mapped a secret hideout for Team Neo Rocket. It's a highly technological hideout, lots of warps, automatic doors, etc. Then, afterwards you finish a story. Everything goes wrong, because supposedly, your evil team is now a bunch of people who hate technology and would fit more in a hideout without it and with lots of ancient mechanisms. This planned team couldn't fit there for a consistent story and map.
And that's my take. Story has to take more priority before the map, because it is what decides what the game is about.

Still, having a complete story isn't entirely necessary nor it's to have all maps done. Both shouldn't be set in stone from the moment they're done, as developing a game is a process. And as you do more of either, you're gradually improving, and maybe you'll reach a point where your mapping and storytelling is better than before. Everything should be malleable, to an extent. I still think story comes before maps though.

 

[Brom]

Introduction
For me, I like working from the macro level to the micro level for whole regions (granted I haven’t finished mapping my region map by map just yet, so do take my advice with a grain of salt.) Generally, I like to start out with a pre-existing place from real life. For this, I use Google Maps and then the custom maps in the “Your Places” feature to help out. So, after scouting out a general place for my region, I choose cities or general locales I want to include. Make sure you also know what you need to have in your region, so for example, if you’re going for an eight Gym game, including at least eight cities plus additional towns like the starting town. At the same time, make sure you don’t make too many cities. Generally, ~15-20 towns/cities is what the main series games go for, but even then, that may still be a large amount depending on what kind of game you’re making.

Spoiler: Picking Cities

(Cities that were of interest to me for my region)

Route Planning & Abstraction
After this, abstraction starts coming more into play. Here, I cut down the number of cities by merging nearby ones together (like Daly City and South San Francisco here or Santa Clara and San Jose). At this point, I do some vague route planning, starting with a spur from the starting town into the region’s first “loop.” in this case, the first loop goes around the Peninsula, South Bay, and East Bay and the second loop goes to the north part of the Bay Area with another spur for the League.

Spoiler: Rough Layout

After this, I more or less traced the topography of the land and made the result here. I want to make it clear that you really don’t have to make a full map and honestly a very abstract version of your map can work fine as long as it makes sense. Some alterations were made to the above map such as a removal of a few routes and cities along with moving where the San Mateo Bridge connects in order to make a cleaner loop.

Spoiler: Cleaned Layout

I’ve made some more changes since the above map, but here’s an example of a minimalist map that works. Since in my game (which to be clear isn’t built on Essentials) is going to likely use “chunks” for maps, I’m kind of taking the idea of making the region map being proportional to the actual maps (each region map square is a 32x32 tile chunk like the DS games).

Spoiler: Minimalist Map

(Area 17, like Castelia City, doesn’t exactly fit on a nice grid, so it takes up an approximate sorta space. The same goes for the green tiles, which in the case of Areas 11, 21, 30, and 43 are dungeons (with Areas 25 and 28 being bridges.))

Placing Points of Interest
For points of interest, there’s a lot more stuff kind of centralized in places like City 17, so rather than keeping everything 1:1 to real life, you gotta use your abstraction skills again! Basically, if you feel that one spot has too many points of interest, feel free to move that to another place. Not only does it make you flex your creative muscles harder in order to make things fit better, but it also adds a degree of separation between your region and the real place. Along with this, consider the pacing of your game when it comes to placing things like dungeons. While gyms (or other long-term goals) are good, making meeting the goals too frequently can be tiring, but at the same time, not meeting them often enough can be boring. Usually, a town or a dungeon between Gyms should be fine, but you can do whatever you feel is best for your game.

Interconnectivity
An important thing to consider too with your region is how the biomes flow into each other. I don’t think it takes too much to make things make sense in the sense of Pokémon, but a gate alone doesn’t solve the issue of differing biomes. Caves, in my opinion, can be a decent way to hide harsh divides in climate, especially since mountains tend to cause divides in things like how much rainfall an area gets. I think along biome flow, I think it’s neat too to have other areas in your region (or possibly other regions!) be referenced to make the region and/or world feel more connected in your game. That said, worldbuilding is good in moderation, so please don’t dump all of your region info on the player! Giving players too much to read often is a turnoff (frankly regardless of if it’s the video game medium or not), so make sure you maximize what you show with as few words as possible (however, this post is getting too long, so do as I say and not as I do!)

TL;DR & Conclusion
While I wouldn’t say everything is exactly “done” with my overall region to a strong degree of certainty, I’m happy with how my region has turned out so far. Ideally, it’s best to not worry as much about the looks of your region in the early planning stages, rather you should 1) worry about what your region needs in order to satisfy the gameplay (like Gym locations) and/or the plot and 2) worry about how each location connects with each other. Now I shall be the one who rivals Sabs (Vanilla) at this point, but I really like worldbuilding type stuff.


ok bye lol >:3c

 

[Dragonite]

So you can kind of divide the approaches to map design into two main categories: gameplay first vs worldbuilding first. It's kind of a top-down vs bottom-up thing.

World first would mean starting with a landmass, reasoning through what kind of ecosystems it would contain - mountains block rain so you tend to get deserts on the opposite side of them from the water, rivers sweep material along with them so downstream areas tend to be very fertile, receding glaciers do some very interesting things to the topology, and so on down the line. Then you figure out where it's likely for cities to be built, and then you figure out the most realistic ways for roads to connect the cities, and then you place the towns and other points of interest, etc. When you're done you figure out what kind of stories would happen in the place you've created. This makes it easier to make a world more feel like a real place that people live in, but it can make it harder to have a believable story, and you can very easily end up like /r/worldbuilding and spend all your time building the world and never actually make a game, and if you overestimate the land area and can't come up with enough content it's pretty easy to end up making Nebraska by accident. (Fun fact: I actually know someone who got a job in level design by having a geology background.)

Gameplay first does the opposite. You have gameplay mechanics and probably a story, and you build a region around that: you need the game to start in a small town, and then you need to give the player a tutorial area or so before graduating them to more interesting things, and you've implemented ice physics so you know there has to be an ice world somewhere in the game. As you can imagine, games generally being about gameplay, this is what usually happens in the AAA space. The gameplay and story benefits are obvious, but also you can end up with places like this where biomes collide in ludicrously wrong ways.

That's fascinating but what do I do?

So, the two fan games I did were just straight-up lifted them from places that already existed: EotS was a six-hour meme on New Jersey, and the Skyrim thing was just the central portion of Skyrim. TESVP didn't really have a lot of world design because that was a game world that already existed, but translating New Jersey into something that worked as a game was somewhat interesting. It doesn't actually map onto the real state very well because New Jersey is actually stupidly top-heavy (about 65% of the population lives north of real-life Route 1), so a lot of the real places had to get kicked around to keep the southern half from turning into a Nebraska.

Being a real place (specifically, the real place that I live) helped in a lot of ways, though - a lot of potentially useful points of interest and natural formations that I probably wouldn't have thought of myself already exist, and some of them have can be repurposed for interesting gameplay features, like this meme being a nice analog foe Cycling Road. Since this is a work of fiction, it also serves as a nice way to get across the region in a hurry without running into any traffic.

I'm pretty sure I've completely lost track of this thread

For non-Pokémon things, I actually probably gravitate towards the game/story-first approach. I need to include a city with a big university as its focal point, and it'd probably look most imposing if it's on the side of a big river. This is how it ended up being built there. Then I need a ruined cathedral. Why is it ruined? What happened to the people there? If I make it close to other locations in the game, will it be hard to justify it being so mysterious? I also need a big, elaborate, but slightly overgrown garden, because there's going to be a story event that happens in a garden. And then there's the big, final area, but I want the party to have to visit it briefly before the final showdown as a bit of a teaser before things start to go down the crapper, so it probably ought to be in the middle of this place, that place, and the other place. Now let's step back and think about how they're probably connected and what geological features frame the whole thing in a way that I like.

I'd like to make a world top-down some day, not now though.

I even squashed down the Portrait-oriented map to be Landscape-oriented and then redrew the entire thing so I could fit it into Essentials!!
It even made the entire region look like a little bird!!

Alternate solution: keep the aspect ratio but rotate it 90 degrees :^)

 

[DragonMaestro]

How I've planned out my game's region is...not really planning. At the least, I think about what a region 'needs' in terms of functionality. A port city or two, a large city that houses a population, small towns and settlements. And from there I think about what makes that place special

Why does this place matter to the region?
Why does this place matter to the trainer?
Why would they need to come back here or want to come back here?

Two examples being that the largest city in my game contains several key areas and the game corner; and another small town containing the nursery.

What shapes some places are the gyms and leaders. What is their role in this town and how does that affect its role in the game.

 

[OldRooker]

I'm in a place that's a bit more touch-and-go at this point. I have the overall story idea for the region, but the specifics are getting filled in as I go and develop my skills in using RPGmaker and Pokemon Essentials. Right now, because I want the game to focus on the research aspect of Pokemon, I'm finding that things are spreading out nicely between cities, gyms, routes, and other important story locations. But, as I go, I try to think of unique places that can exist in these areas, places that help develop the story and flesh out the characters.

For example, just today, I was thinking more on my bug-type gym leader and their personality, and I was trying to think of the kind of city they live in. Along the way, I decided a neat place to add to this city would be a Vivillon garden (aka, butterfly garden) because of their main partner Pokemon, and the fact that they have to do with fashion and color, meaning this garden would be a good place for players to search for the various Vivillon patterns. It further adds to the main idea of my game as it serves as a location where Pokemon are studied (in this case, the reasoning behind why Vivillon patterns are they way they are). I like when little ideas like this come together.

I'm still in the early stages right now, so I can't say that this method will work indefinitely. Hopefully, as I get more ideas on how to do the things I want to do, I'll be able to have a more planned-out region as I get further along.

 

[ValiantSoul]

Personally, when designing my region I designed the map first, and as I go I design the story around it.

From my standpoint, writing the story in its entirety is a daunting task, so I build the Region Map, deciding on biomes, locations, and linking that to the Pokedex. From there, I decide where it would make sense for my character to start, and build the story as I go. I usually look at what the next couple of areas are going to be before I decide on the story for the initial space, so I stay two steps ahead on my map design - though this method does mean I occasionally have to backtrack for a redesign or two, I find it makes for a much more manageable workload when all of this has to be fit in between working life.

My region map isn't usually inspired by anything in particular either, outside of my love for RPG's; I basically just sit down and think "What would I like to explore as the player?" This philosophy extends to my map design too - I can't count the number of times I've gone back and added a secret area here or there, just to add something more exciting for the diligent explorer.

Spoiler: My Region Map

It's not the most surefire method, but I've found so long as one is willing to concede some ideas need to be reworked and concepts redone, it's the perfect way to build a sprawling Pokemon region whilst juggling that work-life balance.