Language…
7 users online: Firstnamebutt, Klug, Mario's GameBase, netyo, playagmes169, qantuum, Zavok - Guests: 235 - Bots: 406
Users: 64,795 (2,378 active)
Latest user: mathew

Creating a Good Overworld

Hello, this is my first tutorial. It's said what's this tutorial about.
Let's start.

Start with a blank map (I am working on main overworld).

Now that you have done that, let's get the shape of the overworld. To get the shape, do something like this.

Notice that there are lots of cutoffs on the overworld. Now, use this () tile to fix that. You should get something like this.

The water inside is awful, replace that with grass tile. It should look like this.

Good job. Now put it on a mountain. Like this:

Perfect. It looks a little dull, doesn't it? Put some decorations. First put the levels on the overworld then the decorations. I won't use paths, but I will put it like the levels were already beaten. With the decorations and the levels, it will look much more pretty.

The final thing. Put an island attached to the overworld.


Part 2: Palletes
The title is explained what's this part about.
Open your palette editor. You should see a bunch of colors.
First, I will explain what NOT to do with your palettes. Don't do this.

It looks awful and ugly.

Now, if you want to make a good palette, you need to get something soothing. Example:

How did I did that? Simple, change the first color of the grassland palette tiles, then the last one, and finally, hold Alt and right click at the first tile, then again, hold Alt, and right click at the last tile. Still you have to watch out so the first and the last tile will have the same color.
If you want to make a wasteland, you just have to do the same thing just with different colors. I have something like this:

Well, that is wrong! The island is still bright. Now that I've changed the island palette, I have something like this:

Let's say you want a dream land. How will we make that? Simple. Just take some colors like red & blue and put them on your overworld. I've got this:

And that's it for the Part 2 of this tutorial. Next I will learn you how to create events and paths.

Now, you've read my tutorial (probably), you will get a bonus IPS patch. Feel free to edit the overworld and post the screenshots of your progress.
The IPS Patch:
Overworld Tutorial
Happy further overworlding.
I'm not too sure how good of a tutorial this is. There's a couple of errors I found in there, like odd perspectives:


the perspective errors are indicated by the red circles btw

If you fix those it would make this a bit more professional.

Also, I don't really see what this has to offer that's different from this earlier guide. Maybe you could go more in depth and talk about editing the palettes, events, or map exits and so on to make it more different.

Hope this helps you out in your tutorial writing
I will fix the perspectives and I meant to go a little more in depth.
you only used 1/4 of the images. either crop or make a bigger sample ow

also, save as .png not .jpg


as for actual content, i agree in that you should go more in-depth. "use this tile to remove cutoff, put it on a mountain, add an island, etc" - these won't cut it. expand on these ideas without outright telling the reader what to do.


Well, besides the fact that starting your design with the shape things, I'm not sure about the quality of this tutorial. You see, you have to be cautious when doing your shapes, so you won't get problems to place the level tiles and events you want. And actually, your tutorial, for me, just teaches people to make an island with a "beach". Doing a good OW goes beyond this. Although you still have to work with good shapes (that's the most interesting thing I saw in this tutorial), you can do more than just two types of terrain, such as mountains, detailed cliffs, coves, caverns and such. And you could extend your knowledge to submaps, which have such a tight space to work and, thus, are more complicated to design.

A second thing I have to complain about: your tutorial showed some instances of perspective errors, as the others pointed out. That's not a good thing to put in a "how to design a good OW" tutorial.

A third thing: you use some terms that sound a bit too generic, like "use this to remove cutoff, add this decoration, etc.". For me, it sounds like this tutorial teaches how to do just one type of OW. I think some more subjective advice would go well in there.

Aside of these things, I saw potential, as doing the shapes first is one of my standard methods to design a good OW. But, like the others said, and there will have someone which agree with me, you have to do some more work to this tutorial, seriously.

And no, I won't write a tutorial about designing a good OW. I know some users around here said that I'm a good OW designer, but I don't think I'm that much.





Dream team (feed them, please):