Town Map Scale: 1:1?

[aozgolo]

So a minor pet peeve of mine in JRPGs was that of "building scale", specifically things like houses that might only be 7x5 tiles on the town map, but the interior is like 25x20.

Obviously this is just one of those "willing suspension of disbelief" things where you can ignore it. However I've often wondered if there's really much need for it anymore?

I suppose it can cut down on travel time in a town not having to walk around huge buildings all the time, but it all depends I think on your mapping skills and how you lay things out.

I'm just curious what others think of the scale issues in regards to exterior/interior? Do you find it gives you more freedom to make smaller exterior houses? Do you particularly notice when a game does maintain scale?

What's your preferred scale for 2D RPGs?

 

[Engr. Adiktuzmiko]

When it comes to 2D games, I don't really mind a non 1:1 scale... I just find it a bit unnecessary, unless you're planning on doing the fade thing on the other thread...

 

[Mouser]

I think one of the _advantages_ of the "map" system is that you're not constrained to a 1:1 size area the way you would be in a 'solid' 3D environment. Larger interiors let you put in more detail, NPC's, movement routes where you can't get 'boxed in' (I hate that), etc... But there's really no way to translate that to an exterior map anyway without the buildings looking like skyscrapers or going with huge flat roofs or something.

Personally, I'm probably guilty of building the insides a little too large [except the first inn in my game, that thing's big enough to build a village in, but it 'works' and other things in my game don't, so redoing that map isn't a priority yet]. I like NPC's that move though, rather than standing still like talking billboards, and that means you need space so the player can't get trapped. Fine line there somewhere, I suppose. Or I could try to figure out how to add 'shove' code to the event handling somewhere...

 

[Venka]

ok.. so I'm a bit of a information hoarder...I like the interior/exteriors to match in size, I don't mind if the scale up some, but I'd like them to keep their proportions.. so if it's an L shaped house.. then inside should look L shaped.. if it's a square.. then inside should be a square.

Back in the day when games were designed on a set grid I use to use grid paper and map out my dungeons and stuff and make a folder I stored all the information in. It was always a pain when you going down a hallway and your map says there should be a wall there..

Of course, games mostly moved away from that style somewhere in the 90s. But I still enjoying having my maps (although they're digital now instead of sheets of grid paper). And my gaming folders are now spreadsheets with everything you could want to know about the game..

But for my maps.. I do screenshots and when in towns I like when they match up because I overlay the interior of the house on the town map and it makes me happy when they fit nicely =P

so enough of my ocd

to mouser, there's scripts out there that prevent npcs from going in certain areas. Yanfly has one that use region IDs that npc can't pass through, but players can. It's awesome for preventing npcs making a bottle neck

 

[Diretooth]

I just like to make the buildings look nice, regardless of interior to exterior. I even have characters lampshade the whole thing by stating that the discrepancy is due to the interiors actually existing within a parallel dimension of pretty much nothing.

 

[Kes]

Like Venka, I think that the shape of the interior should reflect the shape of the exterior.

I think the main problem comes not from keeping the same ratio, but by having the interior maps far too big.  The OP gives the example of a 7 x 5 translating into 25 x 20.  Very few interiors need to be 25 x 20, especially if they are just ordinary houses.  Something closer to 18 x 12 would be a generous interior, and smaller than that for many others seems to work pretty well.

 

[C-C-C-Cashmere (old)]

The rule of thumb is that you should be able to see what the player can see. For instance, if the building is larger than the screen, then it doesn't make sense if the character should be able to see the top of the building and they can't.

 

[Kyutaru]

Frankly scale doesn't matter much.  We already have cities on world maps that are as tiny as the hero.  Every cave is the size of a castle.  Since scale doesn't carry over there, there's no need for it to carry over in towns.  You can just treat the town as a mini world map of its own.  Interiors would then reflect the true size and nature of the building in question.

Considering it also takes heroes a fraction of a minute to travel between cities, time scale is already distorted.  Leave distance be.

 

[EvilEagles]

I find it a bit ironic when you try to achieve a realistic scale between towns and houses, while just about anything else in the game are still fantastical/unrealistic, just for the sake of it making a little more sense that normally, yeah, would just fall into the suspension of disbelief.

I don't have any particular preference in terms of scale. If you can make building exteriors with realistic scale, then cool, please go ahead. But that's most likely not going to result in a better opinion from me. In fact that'll be a confusion, like "Cool but what's the point of that?"

 

[Kaelan]

Why would it be ironic? Going with a 1:1 scale would make a fantasy world more believable, which is exactly what you want in a fantasy game.

I don't really have a particular preference, but it is something that influences the game's presentation pretty heavily. It's the kind of thing that shouldn't draw too much attention to itself if done well. If it's drawing attention to itself, it's probably because something looks off about it (too many empty spaces, boring looking buildings, taking too long to get from A to B, etc).

 

[Engr. Adiktuzmiko]

well, doing it in that way can really cause huge map sizes for the outer maps, unless you're gonna do houses that are only a couple of tiles in area... and couple that with slow walking and your player will probably be bored walking around town...

 

[aozgolo]

I guess it all depends on the style of the game for sure. While I doubt I'd ever use true 1:1 scale again, I would like the scale to be less obvious than 1:2 (where the interiors are twice the size of the exterior). I think Baldur's Gate captured this nicely as most houses were bigger on the inside but not to such a degree that you would really notice unless you were looking for it.

I don't really know if it's worth it to define a set scale and stick to it, that seems arbitrary for something most people wouldn't notice anyway.

 

[Probotector 200X]

I loved how in the first Wild ARMs, when you entered a house, the roof "dissolved" and you could see inside, but still see outside. It was perfect 1:1 scale, seamless transition from exterior to interior. Houses are not huge from the outside, nor crammed on the inside.

I try and keep things in scale relatively, but not 1:1. I'd kind of like to, but...the style I usually use (RTP) doesn't fit that all that well.

 

[Mouser]

I try and keep things in scale relatively, but not 1:1. I'd kind of like to, but...the style I usually use (RTP) doesn't fit that all that well.

Therein lies the problem - it's part of 'old school jRPG' paradigm. Take an inn. A room with a counter and another room with four beds (tiny inn): that's still a pretty big house on the exterior town map. What happens when you want to do a truly big house - think about it, if the interior has enough stuff in it to fill the screen, then the house would be at least screen sized as well: the character would be walking by with nothing but roof on his screen.

It doesn't take that much stuff to fill up the RM game screen, try to reflect that in the outside and you've lost a lot of the 2D game 'feel' out of the gate.

 

[whitesphere]

I accept the non 1:1 scale as an acceptable break from reality, since it allows a map I can walk around in a reasonable amount of time, and a good amount of detail inside.

If we did a 2-D game in a strict 1:1 ratio, on the map view, the hero's entire party would be no more than tiny specks, and would take hours or weeks to travel on the map.    The latter isn't really an issue, since it is game time, not player time.  The former would make it very difficult to navigate.

But, when in a city/town/forest view, it would make navigation cumbersome, since a large town would need to take a proportionately long time to cross.  The game seems to move roughly 2 blocks per second when moving the party.  If each block were, say, 5 feet (roughly character sized), it would take the party at least a few minutes to walk across town.  Figure a small town is a square mile in size (roughly 5000 feet).  That would take 500 seconds, or more than 8 minutes, real time, to walk over.

That's why I accept a non 1:1 ratio as an acceptable break from reality for 2-D games.

Now, on a 3-D game, by zooming the camera differently, a 1:1 ratio can work.  The camera would automatically zoom out for a map view and zoom in when showing the party was important, etc.

 

[aozgolo]

Let us also not forget how Chrono Trigger solved the problem, one of the only few games I can recall where towns were completely displayed on the world map (although they were all tiny villages).

Also the sprites were scaled down on the world map to give it a better sense of scale. I never found issue with world map scales since you are "supposed" to take for granted that your sprite is NOT at scale with the rest of the world, but most games aren't going to try and make separate world map sprites.

 

[Kyutaru]

But I just don't see the "problem".  I never found issue with town map scales since you are "supposed" to take for granted that your sprite is NOT at scale with the rest of the town.

Heck, even most interiors are not at scale.  Do you have any idea how HUGE a castle interior would have to be to be of realistic scale?  My house is bigger than most RPG castles.

 

[Lunarea]

I find that 1:1 ratio makes things look less realistic, and this is primarily due to the fact that RPG Maker relies on a single resolution and tile-based mapping and movement.

Your player will only ever see that 544x416 pixel window, which means that you need to make sure there's enough visual interest within that window. This often translates into making things a little more compact than they would be in real life. But it's still a game and a player would expect, for example, to be actually able to walk more than a single step inside an NPC house. It's a fine line and something all mappers struggle with at one point or another.

Most players aren't going to be counting the number of tiles inside and outside the buildings. At most, they will notice if there's a large difference in shape (L-shaped house that looks like a square, for example), but even that doesn't always detract from the experience as a whole. What's going to be more obvious to the player is a difference in level of detail. If you go from a large and sparsely-detailed town map into a cramped inner map, the town map will look even more bare (and vice versa). This is great when your intention is to point out a difference. But not so great when you want the maps to match in atmosphere.

So, my advice is to ditch the 1:1 ratio and work on adding realism by keeping track of the level of detail on your maps. Keep the general shape the same, but the actual scale should be built around the function and maintenance of detail level.

 

[Kaelan]

But, when in a city/town/forest view, it would make navigation cumbersome, since a large town would need to take a proportionately long time to cross.  The game seems to move roughly 2 blocks per second when moving the party.  If each block were, say, 5 feet (roughly character sized), it would take the party at least a few minutes to walk across town.  Figure a small town is a square mile in size (roughly 5000 feet).  That would take 500 seconds, or more than 8 minutes, real time, to walk over.

You're overestimating distances. Just making the buildings 1:1 scale doesn't mean you actually need to have as many buildings as a real town. You'd still just make an RPG 5~10 building village.

This is far less an issue of practicality and more an issue of art style. RTP with chibi sprites wasn't made to work on that scale, so it would just look odd. But it's perfectly possible in RM if you were mapping with a different style. There are definitely a few 2D games out there that do 1:1 (or something close to it) and make it work. It's just a question of whether you can pull it off with whatever resources you have or not.

 

[aozgolo]

You're overestimating distances. Just making the buildings 1:1 scale doesn't mean you actually need to have as many buildings as a real town. You'd still just make an RPG 5~10 building village.

This is far less an issue of practicality and more an issue of art style. RTP with chibi sprites wasn't made to work on that scale, so it would just look odd. But it's perfectly possible in RM if you were mapping with a different style. There are definitely a few 2D games out there that do 1:1 (or something close to it) and make it work. It's just a question of whether you can pull it off with whatever resources you have or not.

RTP definitely isn't well suited for 1:1 scale but other tilesets can be. Like I mentioned earlier the scale of the world map in Chrono Trigger worked great because of the sprite scale. Sprite scale has as much to do with it I think as anything. Though you can maintain the same scale of sprite from interior to exterior but the greater the scale difference the less plausible it comes.

PS: while I like the screenshot I don't think we can do isometric view in RPGM games