Design Analysis: World Map

The World Map is a pretty straightforward (and superficial) piece of design. To be perfectly honest, there's nothing the World Map allows a player to do that can't be duplicated using other, already-existing means, except to provide a graphical representation of the entire playing area. In support of that single function, it has a bunch of minor graphical features (the flags showing where your parties are, "fading" Areas to show which have been visited, etc. The player isn't likely to spend any appreciable amount of time looking at the World Map, compared to the time in Area and especially Local maps.

Why did I decide to do things this way? Well, again, this wasn't the original design. Originally, I was going to let the player move around on the World Map exactly like they do on the Area Map (which will be described in some minor detail in the next excerpt). Then I realized that there was really no point to that -- you could already do the same thing in the Area Map while having a much better idea of the terrain you were crossing -- and it made things more complex from a coding point of view. To be clear, no functionality was removed with the design change; you can still choose a path from one Area to another Area (and keep setting waypoints in from Area to Area, if you so desire) from within the Area Map. Reducing the World Map to a purely descriptive element simplified and streamlined the design of the map system a great deal without sacrificing functionality; I call that a win-win situation.

Tomorrow I'll continue the excerpts and analysis with Area Maps.