Role-playing games rely very heavily on maps, to the point where they're such a core concept that they can seem quite simple to work with on the surface. They're oftentimes overlooked as well – it's easy to find a tileset, make a quick map, add in some details, and call it a day, you might think. In a lot of cases, particularly with older games, this can actually ring true, at least somewhat: the original Final Fantasy had very simplistic dungeon layouts, varied in terms of layout (such as the Flying Fortress having lots of long, one-tile wide catwalks, or caves being more sprawling and open), but not in terms of design or gameplay otherwise.
Maps serve a much more significant role beyond the initial impressions, however. Being such a core aspect of an entire genre, map design is extremely important, be it world maps, dungeons, towns, or even games that make every place a detailed map rather than separating detailed areas and a more vague world map. Badly-crafted areas can hamper a game immensely, while sometimes maps can be designed in such a smart way that the subtleties might go unnoticed without a closer look. An RPG's difficulty doesn't just come from the increasing stats of the monsters, but also from the world itself, and what sort of challenges it can offer to a player. Japanese RPGs in particular are more linear than other RPGs, and the map design can benefit as a result, since players will always follow a more-or-less set path.
A great example, and one a lot of people might not think of, are the very first Pokemon games: Red and Blue Versions.
The first generation of Pokemon games are quite old, and their age, alongside being the first games in the series that Gamefreak produced, is the reason for their flaws as much as their good aspects, but the way the areas in the game progress in difficulty is one of the best examples of smartly-designed maps to explain. Starting from Pallet Town and progressing in a linear circle around Kanto, the situations the player ends up in get less and less lenient, and eventually culminate in Victory Road, which pits the player in every situation it can use.
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Aside from a scant few detours, the entire game is very linear - it's not a stretch to call the league a clean, single circuit around the region.
The first spike in difficulty is perhaps Viridian Forest, even before the first badge. The early routes in the game are short and simple affairs, and the patches of grass that wild Pokemon can be encountered in a small as well; unless you actively dawdle in the grass, you'll probably only have one or two random encounters between Pallet Town and Viridian City; the player can't encounter any trainers aside from their rival, and the single patch of tall grass outside of the forest can be walked around.
The forest, on the other hand, is designed to offer the player a few choices: the patches of grass near the start of the woods are large, and they're also separate from the bug catchers that will challenge you to battles. The player can either choose to walk through the long stretches of grass, risking random encounters, or they can choose to take a safer path and fight a trainer instead. Then, near the end of the forest, the player is forced through big bunches of grass that also contain an unavoidable trainer near the end, combining the elements that were introduced earlier into a more difficult whole.
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These long patches of grass also afford ample opportunity for catching new Pokemon. Joy!
The next spike in difficulty is Mt. Moon, which forces the player to wander through the equivalent of a permanent patch of tall grass. Encounters can happen at any time in the mountain, and there's also trainers that can challenge the player too – the mountain is also somewhat less straightforward than Viridian Forest was, meaning that the player might get a little lost. This is the end of Viridian Forest, except on a much larger scale.
Rock Tunnel, after a couple more badges, adds in a second quirk on top of these: the need to use Flash to illuminate the cave. This is a very small change, and Flash only needs to be used once to mitigate the darkness, but what this does is force some exploration and Pokemon-catching on the player: they can either catch some Pokemon to fill the Pokedex, then collect the Flash HM from Oak's assistant, or they can try and wander through the tunnel without Flash (an annoying task that sounds too tedious to do outside of a self-imposed challenge, but still entirely possible).
The game eases off at this point, and the Team Rocket sections in both Celadon and Saffron City are more like the Pokemon equivalent of a dungeon: they don't have random encounters, but they do have lots of trainers, and the conveyer belt puzzles and the teleport tile puzzles they contain are much more specialized than just wandering around caverns. They also have many more floors than Mt. Moon or Rock Tunnel, making them bigger in terms of height, even if the floors can seem a bit more manageable. The Safari Zone falls into this concept as well – it doesn't have a puzzling element like the Rocket areas do, but having limited steps to explore, along with having to find the warden's teeth and get the Surf HM, feel similar in execution.
Surfing from Fuschia to the Seafoam Islands, and the Seafoam Islands themselves, are the next step up: surfing is another point where random encounters are possible at any time, along with other swimming trainers to fight. It's more linear than Rock Tunnel, but the water is only half of the point: Seafoam Island itself is the other half, an icy underground area that has a number of boulder puzzles that require usage of Strength. This combines the puzzles from the Rocket sections with the ability to encounter wild Pokemon that the other caves had.
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Thankfully, if the player messes up a puzzle, or wishes to get back to the surface, the islands aren't covered in darkness, nor are they large enough to get very lost in.
Victory Road is the final trial, and for good reason – it combines the random encounters of the underground areas, has more Strength puzzles for the player to solve... but unlike the Seafoam Islands, which are completely empty of other people, Victory Road also has trainers for the player to battle as well. The lead-up to the Elite Four is easily the most difficult section of the entire game because it takes all of the previous situations and throws them all at the player at once, and it makes Victory Road not just a hard area to get through, but also serves as a great capstone to the rest of the game. It's Red and Blue's final dungeon, and, quite appropriately, puts the player through the hardest situation that it can.
The reason that Red and Blue had such a polished curve of design is, admittedly, partly because the games were designed for 8-bit hardware. The Gameboy wasn't nearly as powerful as later handhelds, and the games that were built for it were much more constrained as a result. Again, this is also to blame for Kanto's faults, particularly the lack of visual variety and severe lack of optional content (that these flaws weren't fixed in later games or remakes is another matter entirely), but even some of the later games didn't recreate this sort of design curve as well as they could have. They might have improved in other areas or other aspects of design, like more interesting settings or more places to explore on your own time – and they might be better overall than Kanto anyway because of those improvements – but Red and Blue still serve well to show how smart map design can be used to help a game's difficulty.
With all this said, here are some things to think about in regards to map design:
Maps serve a much more significant role beyond the initial impressions, however. Being such a core aspect of an entire genre, map design is extremely important, be it world maps, dungeons, towns, or even games that make every place a detailed map rather than separating detailed areas and a more vague world map. Badly-crafted areas can hamper a game immensely, while sometimes maps can be designed in such a smart way that the subtleties might go unnoticed without a closer look. An RPG's difficulty doesn't just come from the increasing stats of the monsters, but also from the world itself, and what sort of challenges it can offer to a player. Japanese RPGs in particular are more linear than other RPGs, and the map design can benefit as a result, since players will always follow a more-or-less set path.
A great example, and one a lot of people might not think of, are the very first Pokemon games: Red and Blue Versions.
The first generation of Pokemon games are quite old, and their age, alongside being the first games in the series that Gamefreak produced, is the reason for their flaws as much as their good aspects, but the way the areas in the game progress in difficulty is one of the best examples of smartly-designed maps to explain. Starting from Pallet Town and progressing in a linear circle around Kanto, the situations the player ends up in get less and less lenient, and eventually culminate in Victory Road, which pits the player in every situation it can use.
Aside from a scant few detours, the entire game is very linear - it's not a stretch to call the league a clean, single circuit around the region.
The first spike in difficulty is perhaps Viridian Forest, even before the first badge. The early routes in the game are short and simple affairs, and the patches of grass that wild Pokemon can be encountered in a small as well; unless you actively dawdle in the grass, you'll probably only have one or two random encounters between Pallet Town and Viridian City; the player can't encounter any trainers aside from their rival, and the single patch of tall grass outside of the forest can be walked around.
The forest, on the other hand, is designed to offer the player a few choices: the patches of grass near the start of the woods are large, and they're also separate from the bug catchers that will challenge you to battles. The player can either choose to walk through the long stretches of grass, risking random encounters, or they can choose to take a safer path and fight a trainer instead. Then, near the end of the forest, the player is forced through big bunches of grass that also contain an unavoidable trainer near the end, combining the elements that were introduced earlier into a more difficult whole.
These long patches of grass also afford ample opportunity for catching new Pokemon. Joy!
The next spike in difficulty is Mt. Moon, which forces the player to wander through the equivalent of a permanent patch of tall grass. Encounters can happen at any time in the mountain, and there's also trainers that can challenge the player too – the mountain is also somewhat less straightforward than Viridian Forest was, meaning that the player might get a little lost. This is the end of Viridian Forest, except on a much larger scale.
Rock Tunnel, after a couple more badges, adds in a second quirk on top of these: the need to use Flash to illuminate the cave. This is a very small change, and Flash only needs to be used once to mitigate the darkness, but what this does is force some exploration and Pokemon-catching on the player: they can either catch some Pokemon to fill the Pokedex, then collect the Flash HM from Oak's assistant, or they can try and wander through the tunnel without Flash (an annoying task that sounds too tedious to do outside of a self-imposed challenge, but still entirely possible).
The game eases off at this point, and the Team Rocket sections in both Celadon and Saffron City are more like the Pokemon equivalent of a dungeon: they don't have random encounters, but they do have lots of trainers, and the conveyer belt puzzles and the teleport tile puzzles they contain are much more specialized than just wandering around caverns. They also have many more floors than Mt. Moon or Rock Tunnel, making them bigger in terms of height, even if the floors can seem a bit more manageable. The Safari Zone falls into this concept as well – it doesn't have a puzzling element like the Rocket areas do, but having limited steps to explore, along with having to find the warden's teeth and get the Surf HM, feel similar in execution.
Surfing from Fuschia to the Seafoam Islands, and the Seafoam Islands themselves, are the next step up: surfing is another point where random encounters are possible at any time, along with other swimming trainers to fight. It's more linear than Rock Tunnel, but the water is only half of the point: Seafoam Island itself is the other half, an icy underground area that has a number of boulder puzzles that require usage of Strength. This combines the puzzles from the Rocket sections with the ability to encounter wild Pokemon that the other caves had.
Thankfully, if the player messes up a puzzle, or wishes to get back to the surface, the islands aren't covered in darkness, nor are they large enough to get very lost in.
Victory Road is the final trial, and for good reason – it combines the random encounters of the underground areas, has more Strength puzzles for the player to solve... but unlike the Seafoam Islands, which are completely empty of other people, Victory Road also has trainers for the player to battle as well. The lead-up to the Elite Four is easily the most difficult section of the entire game because it takes all of the previous situations and throws them all at the player at once, and it makes Victory Road not just a hard area to get through, but also serves as a great capstone to the rest of the game. It's Red and Blue's final dungeon, and, quite appropriately, puts the player through the hardest situation that it can.
The reason that Red and Blue had such a polished curve of design is, admittedly, partly because the games were designed for 8-bit hardware. The Gameboy wasn't nearly as powerful as later handhelds, and the games that were built for it were much more constrained as a result. Again, this is also to blame for Kanto's faults, particularly the lack of visual variety and severe lack of optional content (that these flaws weren't fixed in later games or remakes is another matter entirely), but even some of the later games didn't recreate this sort of design curve as well as they could have. They might have improved in other areas or other aspects of design, like more interesting settings or more places to explore on your own time – and they might be better overall than Kanto anyway because of those improvements – but Red and Blue still serve well to show how smart map design can be used to help a game's difficulty.
With all this said, here are some things to think about in regards to map design:
- What sort of challenges do you want to include in your game? If you want to have a lot of elements going on at once, would it be better to strip some of these away at the start and stir them in later, or do you want to drop players in and add more and more as it goes along?
- If your game is going to be more open-ended rather than linear, how will you design your maps to take this into account? Will you use level-scaling on the enemies as discussed in a previous Game Design 101? Will you make each area include its own puzzles or quirks and only combine them once you're sure a player knows about all of them?
- How will you work with the enemies in your areas as you design them? If an area is a confusing, puzzling place that the player will spend a lot of time in, fighting enemies and gaining levels in the meantime, will you make later areas jump a bit in levels to match the map design curve, or will you keep the level curve and map curve separate?