Happy New Year! I hope that you all had a great one and have been blessed with a beautiful 2018! Thank you all for your continued interest in Hyperborea. It means a lot to me!
Today I wanted to talk a little bit about what I’ve been doing with map design. Let’s be honest, RPGMaker MV’s standard mapping system, while nice for the basics, can feel a bit limiting sometimes. I really started to realise this when playtesting the game.
I was thinking, how can I improve this honestly, a bit drab looking map (see left). It was draining me when working on the game and making me feel a bit down. But after doing some research, I came across parallax mapping, which really allows you to expand on your maps in RPGMaker MV. I used the following tools to work with adding effective parallax to RPGMaker MV:
With just a little time and effort. I transformed the bland and “auto-shadow” RPGMaker look into something that, at least I think, looks a bit better. I was saying to some of my friends. It is amazing what some shadows can do.
The first step that I took to make this was to use Orange Screenshot saver plugin and save a full resolution screenshot. Because my initial map was 256 x 256, this was my only way to take an accurate screenshot of the whole map.
After that, I opened the file in GIMP. I created a new layer and started adding gravel near mountains. In order to make it appear rocky, I downloaded some free textures (you can find some here) and put them in my GIMP patterns folder (under a new folder I made: Snow). After that I used the clone tool with the “Acrylic 5” brush in GIMP.
After that, I created a new layer called “shade” at 90% opacity. This one was mostly using as a circle brush at 50%.
That sums up most of my GIMP editing, Just working with a lot of mountains, adding gravel and shadow. I will update tomorrow with more information regarding some of the troubles I’ve had with parallax on big maps. It’s a bit late now and I’ll be heading to bed,
Sincerely,
William Lucht
Arcani Interactive 