I would like to open this post by sincerely apologizing for what a disorganized ramble all of this is.
I love Routes!! They're definitely my favorite places to map - a Pokémon game without well-designed Routes is a tragedy.
Usually, when I make a Route, I always start by making a simple path to the next area (not a
straight path, mind you, but a
linear one - one that doesn't fork or split or anything); on the contrary, I would
never advise to make this path a straight line or just one right angle. At the very least, you should put obstacles arranged so the player has to do a
little bit of movement to the left and right or up and down to cross your Route. A good example of this is one Route that I simply adore,
Hoenn Route 113 - even though the exits to Fallarbor Town and Route 112 are nearly perfectly horizontally aligned, the actual route uses small cliffs and ledges keep the player from walking in a straight line all that way, instead forcing a short detour up before going west again and then back down.
Anyway, this simple path is basically the defining part of your route; the entire rest of your route, detours included, will be made or broken by what basic path the player has to take. With that in mind, it's best to wind about a bit and
pretty much always to make use of elevation - the reason I always isolate this and start with it by itself is because you
can't depend on every player exploring detours, so you need to make the Route as interesting as possible without them.
To put it another way, if the player totally ignores everything optional in your route and takes the shortest, simplest road through it, is it still interesting? If not, your Route
will suffer - no matter how much optional content you cram in, if the player ignores it all and your Route is boiled down to the bare minimum, that bare minimum is what will leave an impression on that player, so it has to be a good impression in itself. A good example of this is
Sinnoh Route 212 (especially the lower east-to-west half rather than the higher south-to-north half, but even that is decent about it, to give an idea of how easy it is to pull off!); a bad example of this is
Kalos Route 21. Heck, I didn't even notice the southern detour myself until I looked up the Route just now, let alone actually explore it, so its bare-bones main path
really stuck out like a sore thumb!
Incidentally, a
VERY IMPORTANT tip:
always, always, always avoid making your whole Route a wide-open rectangle or square! From the perspective of gameplay, this makes the Route overwhelming and uninteresting at the same time; this combination is the worst of all possible worlds, because it's only going to lead the average player to skip as much of the Route as possible, or even to make players who
want to go for 100% completion struggle with doing so and feel frustrated and bored. It also keeps players from feeling the thrill of exploring - while most Routes carry a sense of discovery and excitement, a wide-open space isn't going to feel like you're discovering anything, because… well, you can see all of it. The Routes that stand out like this off the top of my head are Sinnoh's
Route 217 (
216 is a very similar Route that was done far better, for comparison) and Unova's
Route 12 and
Desert Resort although, speaking of the Desert Resort, the Relic Castle is an awesome place - you should avoid mapping any places like this. A simple red flag is the screen size: if your path is going north to south, but you also can't fit the whole thing
east-to-west on your screen (or vice versa), you should narrow it down so the player has some sense of direction. If you want a Route to feel expansive, it's usually a better idea to add a lot of detours or make the path wind about than to make it big but empty. As a player, the satisfaction of exploring a massive Route comes from doing a lot, not just covering a large surface area!
To elaborate a bit more on the basic path, this is usually where you'll want to put any roads (whether paved like
Alola Route 8 or a simple dirt path like
Unova Route 6); there are no roads in optional detours, so this is how you can keep players from getting hopelessly lost (unless you want them to, but that's more a dungeon thing, not a Route thing, right?). Another thing to note about the basic path is grass placement: pretty often, early Routes have a fair amount of mandatory grass, middle Routes have the
most grass, and lategame Routes have the least grass, instead tucking most of it away into optional detours.
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Anyway! With that all in mind, you should have your basic path laid out, right?
holy fudge I've written all of that on the first concept of my post Now, we get to the part of Route design that makes the most expansive Routes interesting: detours. There are a few notable types of detours.
First, we have
ledges and shortcuts! Usually, these work best in winding Routes, especially early in the game, where you want to have a convenient way to go back one way. In these cases, you should use ledges to make a completely grass-free, Trainer-free path that only goes one way (obviously the way
opposite wherever the player is going, so it's used for backtracking, not forward progress!). However, there are also other ways to use ledges: if you have an item tucked away off to the side, you can block one side off with a ledge, then block the other side with grass, so the player has to go through the grass to reach the item but not again after they've gotten it, or vice versa (make sure the player can see the grass before they corner themselves into it with the ledge, though). A good example of this is right at the beginning of
Kalos Route 18, with what I think was a Hyper Potion according to Bulbapedia!
Next are
alternate paths! It's not a good idea to make an
entire Route take two separate paths (I didn't like how
Kalos Route 6 did that, for example), but supposing you have a cluster of trees in the middle of the road, one side can lead to a Trainer and another can lead to grass, or one side can have a Trainer or grass while the other is blocked off by an HM or something (see the top of
Unova Route 13) so that you can take a shortcut if you want. Actually, speaking of Unova Route 13, I like that there were some items on the harder path (with grass and a Trainer) in B2W2 so both paths had benefits, but doing what BW did and putting an item on the HM-blocked path rather than the standard one is fine too since it's harder to reach.
Unfortunately, I couldn't seem to find a legible map of the BW version to show this; sorry!!
Lastly,
offshoots in general are always nice! There are two ways of doing these: long offshoots, with both several Trainers (often optional) and more than one item (or just really notable items/TMs), and small offshoots, with shorter paths and probably only one Trainer and/or one patch of grass, but also a smaller reward (only one item, of course). You should probably have a lot more of the latter, because they're easier to fit in and players are more likely to take them than to take long offshoots, but always have a combination!
Kalos Route 19 is a Route I absolutely
love for how it handled these. First, it has one small shortcut made of stepping stones, which contains an item but also risks encountering two moving Trainers; the main path has only one small patch of flowers and no mandatory Trainers at all (even if you manage to accidentally trigger the Sky Battle, you can say no to her), but it also has no items so the stepping stones have a reward. Then, it has another small offshoot further south with a large patch of flowers and one item. Most interesting, though: right at the beginning of the Route, you can go off the main path for a
big offshoot encompassing the better part of the map in all directions (even going underneath a bridge -
nice elevation use!!), which contains a total of four items (including one TM!), quite a few Trainers (Bulbapedia's map is really small and low-quality, but I count six), and has offshoots of its own that separately entail grass, Strength and Trainers with various items as rewards. Once you complete this biggest offshoot (right when you reach the TM, the main reward for it), there's even a ledge going back to the main path… and the best part? You can
see this TM
from the main road when you enter the Route, so you
know this is an offshoot that's worth exploring! Plenty of other huge detours like this are just ignored (especially in Kalos, actually - consider, again,
Kalos Route 21, where I not only lacked the motivation to explore a major detour but
literally didn't notice it as I was playing), so that Kalos Route 19 managed to entice you, bait you,
dare you to go exploring for that TM literally
as soon as you enter the Route was masterful and made it one of my favorite Routes in the entire series. You need to do more than
have detours - you have to
make players notice them!
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OKAY, NOW THAT THAT'S DONE!! Some quick notes about Trainers and items:
Players of the canon games know to check gaps in tall grass (in Routes), lone rocks (in caves) and any dead ends that seem pointless for hidden items. If you're placing hidden items, these are really good spots for them! That said, you can obviously have fake-outs, too - it's just as important to have gaps in tall grass, lone rocks or dead ends that
don't have hidden items, so it's somewhat of a gamble to pursue them! Also, it's common that beaches/deserts (sand tiles in general) and forests have a lot of unmarked/unnoticeable hidden items, especially Stardust and Tiny Mushrooms (among other valuable/sell-only items); people usually use the Itemfinder/Dowsing Machine/Stoutland Search in these areas (if you have such an option in your game), or just press A a lot. These are the best places to put unmarked hidden items, because players will actually know to look for them! I honestly believe that it's very important to follow canon precedent for hidden items, a lot more so than for any other items/Trainers/grass/"rules" in general, because if you get too creative with them, people will miss them altogether and any innovation you make in the field just goes unnoticed.
Usually, the main path has very few mandatory Trainers (one or two, maybe) and the majority of Trainers are either optional (moving or turning) or placed in the offshoots or alternate paths so that you can skip them if you want, so your exploring isn't bogged down by battle after battle - that's "fake difficulty," basically. Also, Game Freak generally doesn't put any Trainers on Route 1, though this is a fair rule to break!
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OKAY, LAST SECTION! I don't have TOO much more to say, but there is one last thing I want to go into: aesthetic. The thing that makes most Routes memorable is being distinct. You can have a game full of Routes that are completely perfect by every standard to which anyone holds them, but nobody will notice that if they all look the same. Hoenn has really well-designed Routes from a gameplay perspective, but with a few standout exceptions (
Route 113, with its falling ash; Routes
119 and
120, with their jungle environment;
Route 111, the only desert in the game), most of them looked pretty much the same as one another, which made ORAS a huge bundle of missed opportunities to fix that after the utterly beautiful region that was Kalos. You don't need totally different environments to be awesome (obviously not every region has room to have mountains, plains, forests, jungles, deserts, volcanoes, marshes, lakes and oceans all in one), but you can do small things, like using different paths and trees, various weather conditions and fogs, and even just subtly changing the color of the tiles (like making a drier Route yellower than a lush area even with the same exact graphics other than colors) to make all of your Routes stand out from one another. I really enjoyed what Platinum did with Sinnoh's Battle Zone, like
Sinnoh Route 225, for how it did this - the tiles were all slightly different from mainland Sinnoh, with darker cliffs of volcanic rock, palm trees and generally a tropical feeling, while Diamond and Pearl had pretty much the same areas tile for tile but they looked a lot less distinct. Even if you're not using a totally different environment, there's always room to change up your aesthetic a
little bit, and I strongly recommend messing around with your tiles' color palettes, switching up your trees once in a while and whatever else you want - it'll go a lot further than you'd think!
SORRY THIS WAS SUCH A TERRIBLY LONG RAMBLE
OKAY I'M DONE
Edit: Added links to maps of all of the specific Routes named!
Edit 2 about a century later: it looks like the horizontal rules were broken and causing most of the message to be straight-up missing, but thankfully it was all still present even though it wasn't visible as a reader, so I was able to add it back with minimal difficulty!
