Showing perspective on maps

[BrandedTales]

Had a lot of trouble deciding where to post this, so if I'm in the wrong spot, apologies! While this has direct implications for my game, it is more of a broad question.

To those with The Mapping (Or other Artistic) Skills...

How would you show perspective on a map with very tall buildings and sky bridges (without parallax)

For example, imagine these stairs are supposed to represent having gone up a fairly high distance:

Spoiler

How do you properly convey the height on a 2-D interface?

Thanks in advance!

 

[Andar]

best option would probably be to add several irregular cliff tiles to the areas left and right of the stairs to give the impression that the land there also goes up.

 

[Tatsumaro]

making the towers size smaller as you go trow the stairs.

 

[Crabs]

You need to provide more visual information to the player. Stairs and shadow distance aren't enough. Also the pillars are not helping; I can see the pillar are growing in size, but there's no visual clue that the stairs is going up too.

Show that the stairs are somehow connected to a certain height of the pillar. I managed to achieve this by splitting the stairs in multiple sections and making some balconies.

In your case, you should also connect a full-visible pillar or a wall structure to the top, to show the player how tall is your building.

Briefly, when working with stairs, the trick is to try connecting sections of your structure to other elements of the map to provide height information. It can be a tall tree, a pillar, a cliff, a wall, another building, for instance. As more information you give, better your tall structure will look.

Here's a screenshot for reference.

 

[Eraine]

I was intrigued by your question and started playing with a map. I think breaking up the stairs would help, and rearranging to towers to the sides. They don't feel connected to the stairs in your example.

There's an image with some ideas that might help.


I think the bottom left one works best.

 

[BrandedTales]

Thanks for the great ideas! I appreciate it.