World Maps you Made Of Your Own Imagining for Any Reason

[kkairos]

I will kick off by showcasing my ZZT mapping addiction. MOSTLY of unfinished and probably permanent haitus'ed games

Unnamed ZZT RPG


Sophie the Rain Princess (adventure, that was closest to a title I had)


The Archivist Job (or Archival Job. I hope I still have the .ZZT somewheres)


The Dark Depths of Mars, same basic idea as Polis but probably a couple more proper dungeon-crawly segments.


Unnamed action-adventure treasure hunting game. Someday, little ship, you'll be in a real game.


The Polis and the Three Princes - would have been an RPG with some combat/hopeful RP options for progressing the story


OK this one was actually finished, Big Beast in the Maze


UP NORTH, ZZT RPG (maybe with modified versions like Weave.) Affectionate parody of RPGs but Skyrim and Morrowind in particular. I will add that I'm very happy about having somewhat malformed ascii symbol statues where Daedra shrines would normally be.

[RT-55J]

wait is that the "literal skill tree" you were talking about in the upper-left corner of the Up North map?

that's fantastic

[RT-55J]

Sometime back when I was in high school, shortly after the release of Super Metroid Redesign, I drafted up plans for some totally epic ROM hack that certainly would have been within my abilities to produce as a 16 year old. I'm not sure where the notebook I drew it in still is, but I at least have this blurry, messy scan:



Recently, I cleaned up the map and made it proper Super Metroid style, but there were a lot of notes and details that I couldn't quite understand from the scan 



Upon further reflection, I'm not particularly impressed by the design of this map, but there are still particular setpieces and area ideas that it conjures to mind that I'd like to revisit one day.

[kkairos]

wait is that the "literal skill tree" you were talking about in the upper-left corner of the Up North map?

that's fantastic

Oh yes. Good eye

Upon further reflection, I'm not particularly impressed by the design of this map, but there are still particular setpieces and area ideas that it conjures to mind that I'd like to revisit one day.

Rad on both counts. both that you did that much in a notebook and that you redid it so elegantly. Does modded SM normally use the slopes in the maps like that, or does it still have the block-maps?

[RT-55J]

Super Metroid has several different kinds of sloped map tiles, but in practice it uses them rather sparingly (less than 5 rooms total I think). Super Metroid Redesign used those tiles much more liberally, owing to its larger and more densely-packed map design, and that was one of my top inspirations when making this map.

[neen]

it's missing That Room (you know the one)

[RT-55J]

Here's a 3x3 map of a ZZT world I last touched literally 2 years ago. It's for the supposed "Wifegame" project alluded to in my most recent zine release:



It wraps around funky, with the horizontal and vertical connections being offset by one board.

You start off in that apartment building in the bottom middle, and you're supposed to go to the space port. Somehow this ties into finding where your wife went or something. (idk where I didn't have a very clear concept for the plot here)

I wanted this word to have very early-ZZT aesthetics, and specifically channel the same sort of energy as Darby's Crazy Town (hence the non-euclidean space). Coincidentally, Dr. Dos is in the middle of developing a "Darby-like" this very moment.

(No, I do not know why I used the British spelling of "jail" there.)

[kkairos]

i assume an eldritch horror hides in a gaol whereas a regular horror hides in a jail

[Cera Sizzle]

Around a year ago I was really into the fan remake of the 1999 classic Lego Rock Raiders. The game was remade in unreal around 2020 and featured a map maker with a scripting system that allows for a decent amount of customizability. After playing it a bunch and writing down ideas for levels I decided to try and make some myself. It pretty rapidly increased in scope partially as feature creep but also a desire to push the systems as far as they could. I won't go into detail but as an example my level was round 123KB while the average main game level was 50KB. Below you can see an overview with and without event triggers along with a custom graphic of my png tuber I made for it

[neen]

everything about this is amazing

[RT-55J]

hot dang that's a lot of triggers

[Cera Sizzle]

It was a pain to set up but most of the triggers were just adjustments to the amount of resources each wall gives when destroyed. The game doesn't really have a way to do that cleanly so I have to create an event for each of the like 100 walls in the game.

The base game's levels are pretty chill with things like resource counts and difficult so I wanted to create something that plays more like a difficult plando, requiring intense resource management and usage of advanced tech.

And this picture doesnt even show the most insane part where I dynamically flood the level. Those events are too complicated for the event placer and have to be coded to the file

[RT-55J]

I watched a video about map topology in Metroid games, and felt inspired to make a connectivity graph of Tour of Italy:



look @ how interconnected that world is!! 

(the numbers are meaningless and oops idk why 32 is still highlighted there oops)

I used this webapp to make it: https://graphonline.top/en/

Under "Settings" you can set a background image, so I just tossed Ambureon's map of the hack over there, and placed a node for each room. Then once I was done I found the "Arrange the Graph" function to make it look more abstract, and then did some manual correction to reduce some overlaps.