Making Videogame Maps

[RT-55J]

As most of you know, I like making videogame maps! I used to be an active contributor on VGMaps.com when I was younger. More recently, I've started making 1:8 scale maps of Metroid romhacks. There a section on the main site chock full of them. Check it out!

I still have a couple dozen more romhacks I want to make maps of, but I also want to branch out and do other stuff, like maps of ZZT or UFO50 games (maybe even screenshot maps again).

Vainger from UFO 50 is on my list, but I can't get Steam to output png screenshots for some reason (only blurrific jpegs). It really sours my mood. (Also, UFO 50 is weird because the screen is like 13.5 tiles and Vainger's map grid seems strictly aligned with that.)

Feel free to talk about maps you've made or maps you want to make or maps you wish someone else would make. They can be screenshot maps, minimaps, graph paper maps, napkin maps, etc.

[RT-55J]

Here's as far as I got with my test map of Vainger before stopping:



If you zoom in closely you can see all the crusty, ugly JPEG artifacts that we all hate in our maps.

Anyhow, it appears that the way this game handles having screens be 13.5 tiles tall is by alternating having the edge of one screen be at the boundary of two 16x16 tiles and having the edge of the next screen be halfway through a 16x16 tile. Very weird.

[RT-55J]

A long, long time ago I was working on some screenshot maps of The Adventures of Batman and Robin for the Sega Genesis. I only released one map publicly on VGMaps.com, but just the other day somebody emailed me asking me if I had more maps.

I dug through my old, ancient folders and found out that I indeed did.

As a test of the file attachment feature, here are maps of the first stage. I am especially proud of how stage 1-1 turned out, given the absurd screen-wide raster effect the game uses there.

idk if I'll ever properly finish this project though

[Cania]

oh hey i might have borrowed some of your work for my 4K SNES Wallpaper project:

https://cania.zone/snes/

all of those are ripped from VGMaps. Recognize any?

[RT-55J]

Recognize any?

Contra 3 is the only SNES game I recall submitting to VGMaps back when I was doing screenshot maps, and I don't see that there.

I think Stages 2-5 all have portions that could make for good wallpaper material.

(thinking about it, now that i'm using an image editor with proper layering support for my projects, SNES screenshot maps might be nice to do...)

[Cania]

oh hell yeah i just made two right now

[RT-55J]

aw yeah that's the stuff

[RT-55J]

Two things:

• I got a clean rip of the Vainger maps from the UFO 50 Discord, so, uh, expect something sometime after I finish my Oktrollberfest surprise.
• Fellow Metroid hack cartographer "drb" has made a website finally!!

[RT-55J]

Some dataminers ripped full-scale maps of Vainger, so I decided to do miniature-scale maps of it instead. Given UFO 50's screen dimensions, 1:4 scale felt like a better fit than 1:8 scale.

Work in progress (probably won't start this project in earnest until next month):

[RT-55J]

I did some work on that Vainger map lastnight [not pictured]