Hi ! I have an RPGMaker project in the works... One of the most daunting things to me is planning out all the maps, locations, and making tiles for everything in the overworld... How did you approach doing that with slarpg? How much planning went into designing the locations, and spriting them?
Not to scare you off or anything, but making the world itself was definitely the most time-consuming part of making SLARPG.
Usually I'd start working on the basic tileset before anything else, to figure out the vibe of an area. This early experimentation is usually the most fun and invigorating part for me. Then I'd do very rough sketches in a drawing program to block out the overall layout and flow of an area, trying to envision how that will shape the pacing of the story. This is more about the big picture of every map than trying to make it look pretty. How does this area connect to other areas? Do I need some kind of diversion to make this section longer? Should it open up more over time as you find certain key items? Are there shortcuts for backtracking? Are the layouts varied enough from room to room to keep players from getting lost? And then from there it's just about building the maps one by one, tile by tile, rigging up any necessary event logic and going back to add the tiles for additional details as necessary. Which is the most time consuming part. But then you have a whole area you can run around in. Wow!
Granted, my tilesets can be fairly complex in their detail, and that added more time to the process for me. Many hours spent manually arranging grass and tree and cliff face tiles so everything lines up right. Using simpler tilesets and cramming in less detail on every screen would save you time. But there's always going to be some amount of tedium here. That's just game development for you. You get used to it with experience.
