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I was hesitant to post this since I noticed my forum avatar is a bit too prevalent on this subforum's pg1, so apologies if it's too many threads. With that out of the way, I'd like to get to the topic at hand.
If you guys are familiar w/ the old school Zelda games, as in the 2D ones before Ocarina of Time. Anyway, the way their dungeons are designed is such that the entire dungeon is cut up into smaller maps. At first, I went this route for my dungeons due to the technical limitations of LTBS and having my encounters on the same map (i.e. 1 encounter = 1 map) since I did not want to clone my maps and have the player teleport to an identical facade of the map. However, after watching some videos and thinking about it, there are some advantages to this.
For instance, with the dungeon split up, the player can tackle each room or section as its own challenge to overcome as smaller pieces to a larger puzzle. Another thing you can do is have treasure chests that are visible but unreachable from a certain section of the map. I'm sure there are clear disadvantages as well, so I'd to hear from you guys on whether you like this type of dungeon design vs making a single big dungeon map or perhaps only having separate maps for separate floors.
For a puzzle-oriented game, I can see why Nintendo did this, plus the hardware available at the time couldn't handle anything bigger I imagine. Now, I'm not making a puzzle game nor does it seem very prevalent here since we're all about JRPGs mostly lol. So yea, with the assumption that it's not a puzzle game (but could contain puzzle elements, just not its focus), would splitting up a floor of a dungeon into multiple maps be a good idea?
Here are some screenshots examples from my project to show what I mean:
And this is what the player would see but w/o fog of war (I only posted 2 of 6):
If you guys are familiar w/ the old school Zelda games, as in the 2D ones before Ocarina of Time. Anyway, the way their dungeons are designed is such that the entire dungeon is cut up into smaller maps. At first, I went this route for my dungeons due to the technical limitations of LTBS and having my encounters on the same map (i.e. 1 encounter = 1 map) since I did not want to clone my maps and have the player teleport to an identical facade of the map. However, after watching some videos and thinking about it, there are some advantages to this.
For instance, with the dungeon split up, the player can tackle each room or section as its own challenge to overcome as smaller pieces to a larger puzzle. Another thing you can do is have treasure chests that are visible but unreachable from a certain section of the map. I'm sure there are clear disadvantages as well, so I'd to hear from you guys on whether you like this type of dungeon design vs making a single big dungeon map or perhaps only having separate maps for separate floors.
For a puzzle-oriented game, I can see why Nintendo did this, plus the hardware available at the time couldn't handle anything bigger I imagine. Now, I'm not making a puzzle game nor does it seem very prevalent here since we're all about JRPGs mostly lol. So yea, with the assumption that it's not a puzzle game (but could contain puzzle elements, just not its focus), would splitting up a floor of a dungeon into multiple maps be a good idea?
Here are some screenshots examples from my project to show what I mean:
And this is what the player would see but w/o fog of war (I only posted 2 of 6):