Drawing Maps

[Sangrin]

Is it a bad thing that a game forces you to draw your own map ifyou want one? Is it simply the game allowing you to wipe your own ♥♥♥ and handle these things yourself, or is it flawed design decision that takes you out of the games flow to fiddle with something that could easily be solved with a GUI?

I was mulling this over when I was drawing up a map for the 5th floor. I actually really enjoyed it, then I kinda thought about why I enjoyed doing something this tedious. I came to the conclusion that I enjoy it because it gives me nostalgia for the old CRPG days when I ran dungeons in Asheron's Call.

What's your feeling on it? Should there just be a map, even if it's ♥♥♥♥ing Diablo 2 levels of basic, or do you think it adds to the game by forcing you to improvise? While I find the Hansel and Gretel tactic leaving behind bits of armor and weapons as landmarks endearing; I'd be lying if I said it wasn't inconvenient and added very little to my overall enjoyment.

[jerry gourd]

One good option is just keep your directional bearings

[Gheist]

Originally posted by Ivan Ivanovich Ivanowsky:

One good option is just keep your directional bearings

via compass

[drunkenvash]

If you remember highly popular games like Everquest. You had to draw your own maps. It's part of the game experience.

[PsychoThruster]

I made a post suggesting making drawing an in game function. Let us draw in the journal

[Sangrin]

Originally posted by drunkenvash:

If you remember highly popular games like Everquest. You had to draw your own maps. It's part of the game experience.

I do, but with all older games a large reason for the lack of maps was because of engine limitations, not just a design decision

My point was that now that we no longer have those restrictions, and I was mulling over how valid of a design choice removing the option for a map is.

In Everquest, your immersion of the experience is negligble. Yeah, you could role-play and do stuff like that but you always had to take yourself out of the experience to do many things.


Exanima really needs the player to be immersed, and the developers obviously strive to make the game as immersive as possible; so I was curious if it seems hypocritical to force the player to manually pull out a piece of paper IRL and take themselves out of the game. There's a lot of cool ways they could implement a map, it doesn't have to just be a static PNG image of the whole complex.

You could have a small piece of parchment in your inventory that gets scribbled on automatically the more coridors you explore, and you can manually put pins in the map to mark off landmarks and objectives. Sort of the way Minecraft did it, but without a marker showing "You are here" or anything dumb like that.

Like, the map is literally just a piece of paper with black lines and nothing else, and the player themselves could add tiny notes to it and pins to mark it themselves. Making the map a part of the game and amplifying the immersion factor even more

All I'm saying is that there are really cool ways a map COULD be implemented, and I worry that the exclusion of a map is a missed opportunity.

[ImpTaimer]

This is the type of game they WANT you to do this type of stuff.

But either way keeping your barrings is NIGHT AND DAY when navigating these places.

Not even kidding. For the longest time I'd just let myself believe the compass was useless.

The area maps aren't completely maze-like. "Start" and "Finish" are placed generically, with a maze in between.

Area 3 goes from a labrynth to a shopping mall by simply keeping the camera pointed "north".

*EDIT* said 4, meant 3.

[White ⁧⁧Wolf]

Originally posted by Sangrin:

You could have a small piece of parchment in your inventory that gets scribbled on automatically the more coridors you explore

I agree with this and suggested basically the same thing a while back, but it didn't get anywhere. Either the devs are working on it(or going to) or it's never going to happen.

[PsychoThruster]

From what I've been able to dig up they do have a plan for something map related, but it's only being discussed in their insider forums, which is assinine but whatever. I doubt we'll get much info about it here.

[Gozer]

I love it the way it is now.

Harken back to the days of Everquest and Uiltima Online
PC games have been watered down since then.

I hate pressing M and seeing an overlay, ruins all the devs hard work.

I like having a hardcopy next to my keyboard for reference. Some say it breaks immersion, phaw! Being frustratingly lost breaks immersion.

Seeing a high tech overlay, or a mini map, in my low fantasy dungeon crawl breaks immersion.

A great game like this is always going to have community members that will produce great maps.

Especially if there is no map feature.

[Tempered]

Having drawn my own maps for this game and countless others over the years, I can honestly say that, for me, it is just a tediuos chore that takes you out of the game world. It adds nothing to immersion, having to stop what you are doing every couple steps to scribble on a peice of paper.

I can't say that I need a map with Exanima, or necessarily want the devs to devote a ton of time to it, but it would be nice to have once everything else is done.

Another way of looking at it. You end up getting lost because you don't have a map and got turned around during a fight or whatever. So now you are forced to draw a map that you obviously didn't want to draw in the first place. So you draw your map. When you have finally finished the map, it is a map of places you have already been, and you don't need it anymore. So the only reason to even draw a map is so that the lazy bastard that didn't draw a map can use yours.

[Gheist]

I'm totally down for being able to draw on parchment if available and or your journal to jot down maps and or map information. It doesn't take you out of the game and would make sense. I would hate an auto filling map personally, but again personal preference. I loved Everquest and the lack of maps, I didn't find it took me out of the experience, I feel it added to it. Again, in game drawing of a map would be a great idea.

[beans]

Originally posted by The Hidden Hand:

I'm totally down for being able to draw on parchment if available and or your journal to jot down maps and or map information. It doesn't take you out of the game and would make sense. I would hate an auto filling map personally, but again personal preference. I loved Everquest and the lack of maps, I didn't find it took me out of the experience, I feel it added to it. Again, in game drawing of a map would be a great idea.

To make it less tedious, perhaps we could have tools to make map drawing slightly more automatic. Instead of drawing lines, have it draw corridors (a space with two lines on either side), since, obviously, you're always going to be drawing corridors. There should still be an option to draw lines for careful detailing, but being able to draw whole corridors makes the process a lot more engaging, since you're able to spend more time thinking about the layout of the map instead of trying to draw a readable map. A grid-based system might be too much, though.

Those are just some examples. I'm sure there are more things that could be done to make the process more interesitng. Even if it's not "immersive," it's far more important that the process is actually fun, because if it isn't fun, the only people who make maps will be the extremely hardcore players who are willing to do it.

[angrytrex]

It's such a slippery slope between having avoiding the tedious chore of map drawing and having a fancy automap which holds your hand as it guides you towards the quest objective.

[PsychoThruster]

All we'd need is a stripped down version of something like Microsoft paint to make drawing maps in game a relatively frustration free and rewarding task. The ability to do squares/rectangles, circles, and free draw. Throw some artistic funk on it so it looks drawn and not pixelated and we're good to go.

[White ⁧⁧Wolf]

Originally posted by angrytrex:

It's such a slippery slope between having avoiding the tedious chore of map drawing and having a fancy automap which holds your hand as it guides you towards the quest objective.

It wouldn't need to guide you at all. That would simply suck. I don't see why they couldn't add the 'piece of ingame paper that slowly fills out as you explore rooms' since I don't see why the character wouldn't be able to do that if it was real life. They could carry it like any one of the scrolls but maybe slightly bigger, like the map on the table in level...3? Maybe not that big, so that it can still be held in the hands properly. No one says there has to be any handholding of any kind and that you need to put in the work of exploring and maybe stay in each room for a certain amount of time to give the character time to fill it out.