How to Design Gameable Maps

hello i'm kyle and this video is brought to you by the old road zine which just finished up its funding uh period on kickstarter for zine quest 3. i wanted to talk about this map and this map so these are the first two maps that i did for the kickstarter to get everything going um to kind of get the juices flowing and figure out you know what it was that i was actually going to be making and i stumbled upon a little problem so this map turned out really really well and this map is also very nice but it has a glaring problem with it um it's easy to fix i figured out how and i'm going to tell you how i figured out how to diagnose the problem this all comes down to me trying to articulate to myself what are the rules what are the criteria that i can use to critique my own work and understand what i what i respond to in the work of other map makers and illustrators that inspired me to do this project in the first place so my big question is uh what makes a map gameable and so of course we have to start off with what our definition of games is um so my my personal favorite the one that i find is most useful and adaptable um and applicable to the the kinds of spaces i operate in is um this one by bernard suits from his book grasshopper that reads playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles and it's that word obstacles that we are going to really focus on because especially in tabletop rpgs anytime the gm says um you you you face 20 owl bears the player is not allowed to just say i win there are rules there are obstacles there is struggle there is the possibility of failure there are all these things and that is chiefly uh from where we derive the mystique of games is that uncertainty of outcome and playing around in this unnecessary obstacle space so the question then becomes what how do you define a gameable map now that we have defined games and i find that the most gameable maps have two major qualities gameable maps are evocative and convenient um i warn you now i i i'm a recovering academic i actually get a lot of inspiration out of studying words and their roots and just understanding how we kind of arrived at the language we used to describe our world today [Music] we're going to start with evocative okay so what does evocative mean how do i define evocative the way that i mean it so i have split it into two other academic words needlessly um evocative in in the sense of gameable maps means that it indexes materiality and sensor reality all right sincere reality is not a word that uh that i commonly use so i'm probably gonna say it wrong a couple of times but let's start with materiality so uh christina murdock mills describes materiality as materiality in works of art extend beyond the simple fact of physical matter to broadly encompass all relevant information related to the work's physical existence this is all from her wonderful article called materiality as a basis for aesthetic experience in contemporary art so when we're thinking about materiality we need to think about not just the structure of the matter but but sort of the meanings associated with it so for instance right before us we have uh some post-it notes and an index card right and sort of like the workbench drawing desk in front of us all of this gives us not only information this is not just useful and handy it actually would have been handier for me to type all this stuff out and put it in a powerpoint presentation right so i have chosen the specific materials not just for their material density or their ability to you know to interact with pens and pencils right uh i chose them because they kind of look scrappy they're what people use when they take notes we'll look at how this gets into maps in just a second but first i want to talk about sensor reality sensoriality is just means of or relating to the sense or the power of sensation so anything we can put in visual media that makes us feel cold or or sticky or kind of gives us it evokes that sense of of temperature or other senses that you can't just get through the eyes any of those kind of clues that we can put into our maps is going to help that game be more runnable so the evocative aspect of this definition of gameable maps is mostly pointed at the game master as you have this map out in front of your players the game master is going to be able to look at it and really pull a lot of the description and cinematics and everything just from the map without having to go to notes and block text and all of these things will be evident just from the visuals on the map page itself so with evocative out of the way what do i mean by the word adveniant it simply means literally coming from without it has the same root word as adventure so roland bartz put it this way in his book camera lucida in this glum desert suddenly a specific photograph reaches me it animates me and i animate it this is what creates every adventure right so when you are out in the world with a camera which is what he's talking about photography um and you're out in front of a bunch of boring stuff that everyone can see whenever they want but the when you have a certain eye for it there is an advent a an adventurism that that comes from certain compositions as you're looking through your viewfinder trying to figure out what photo to take that is from where that that sense of discovery comes from is just through the looking and kind of listening to that moment to see what calls out to you so a map that is at veniant is going to be a map from which adventures spring and calls both players and game masters to look closely at the map just to interact with it just to find out different ways they can play with the information that's on it i also want to talk about verbs so this concept of verbs as as i understand it comes from this wonderful book called a game design vocabulary from which i probably caught this whole like vocabulary definition disease originally right um so this is written by ana anthropy and naomi clark and it is a must read for game designers and artists everywhere there's just so much great information in there it is mostly targeted towards digital game making and video games but there's so much more there than just its direct application so in this quotation we we see what what is meant by verb but we can't design the player or her behavior we design the rules that shape her experience her choices her performance rules are how we the designer communicate verbs are the rules that allow her to communicate back in other words what you can do in a game is how is is how we operate through the language of interactivity through the interaction through the rules text there is a back and forth this is especially true i think of tabletop games where we have the rule text out in front of us and we are talking about what is and is not allowable within that space and if you think about a character sheet skills attributes spells i cast a spell i attack the aloe bear these are rules that we use to interact with the game world i have brought verbs into the conversation because i believe that it belongs in contact with this idea of advenence we want advent verbs we want the verbs especially in adventure games especially in kind of like high fantasy role-playing action-oriented stuff we want the verbs that are available for our players to be exciting to be fun to be adventurous right so to illustrate what i mean let's take a look at this first map that i i really am very so pleased with it turned out that i accidentally did exactly what i'm describing the first time because i hadn't articulated it or wrote it down or made a silly video about it i didn't really know how to do it again reliably but i think i figured it out so let's judge this map according to how evocative it is and how convenient it is all right so what are the materials and what are the senses that we see here we see uh kind of crumbling stones we see creaking wood uh we see uh moth eaten banners like all of this we see a a a a corroded bell atop a tower uh we see that this tower has a hole in it it's not just set pieces these are all they carry with it a certain meaning we also have several visual cues we have this this kind of creeping mist that kind of gives us this this muted kind of uh mountain top cold environment right we can kind of feel that dew sticking to the backs of our necks and kind of seeping into our socks as we walk up the mountain right and don't worry this is uh this is not the original map this is just for demonstration purposes only what are some other senses that we have we have like sort of the the sense of sound from that big bell uh we have um the sense of taste from this tiny little apple here uh we have kind of like the sense of uh what it would feel like to to walk up these stone stairs and into the grass and across this so all these sounds and and and tactile sensations come from the specificity of the materials that i'm indexing through the work but how does it compare in terms of advenence what are the verbs associated with this place so we have the stairs so we get climb through the stairs we have a bridge so we get cross with the bridge we have some kind of like giant monster eggs so maybe we get uh defend or attack or steal right um or search we get these monster nests really have a lot of different things you can do with them uh depending on what is actually nesting here um and even if we look closely we see that there are dead men's bones in one of these nests so this is indeed a perilous place for some what else do we have we have uh we have some more crumbling stairs that go up to this statue the statue is missing ahead and there's another statue hidden beneath here with an offering plate so we get perhaps um restore or defend or offer worship right we have all of these associated verbs we have a ladder that you can climb up we have birds that you can free we have a bell that you can ring we have cliffs that you can climb or fall off so many verbs are just built into this just just from trying to make a visually appealing map in the first place and stories come out of this enviedians stories come out of the evocative in vibrant materials on this map so i could very easily think uh that we would we would look at this map as a group and we would plan out a story where we had to climb up the stairs cross the bridge fight the orcs climb the tower and ring the bell to alert our our neighbors that the orcs have arrived and that we need help i could also see something where you climb the side of the cliff and you you sneak past the guards and you interrupt a profane ritual that is happening at one of these uh altars or maybe you've come up the stairs to actually make an offering to this to this statue but you found out that the head is missing where's the head oh the head's over here so if we have to sneak in here to get the head to fix our statue so our harvest is good like all of this stuff is perfect for one shots and it's it's perfect for impromptu stuff read the map as a group and decide what kind of story you think you can tell with it [Music] now this map might seem very similar but i think i sort of had a final fantasy tactics map stuck in my head too much the the idea of this is like you could very see easily imagine two opposing forces kind of setting up on opposite sides of this board and maybe the archers are going to uh you know fire upon you uh from these higher places and you have to kind of pick and dodge in between here and maybe like move some mine carts around for cover and that kind of stuff there's there's a lot of wonderful tactical combat to be had on this map but not so much in the way of evocative materials but let's think about this in terms of verbs we have stairs that we can climb we have carts that we can maybe push along these tracks we have lots of exploration verbs but not much else it is basically set up for combat but i think there's only one thing i need to fix about this we put a door here and suddenly it becomes about stopping someone from opening up the gate to the abyssal plane or reinforce the door to keep whatever's on the other side from breaking out or we have to get through here and that this way is guarded or maybe the door was discovered during the process of mining out this cave and we have to stop someone from opening it up to look for more riches right there's all of this stuff just by putting some mystery by putting an obstacle right that is the issue with without this door you could just freely come and go and kind of go across here sure you can put enemies on here um but there's nothing that is that is that is giving us this advent from the map itself so we have to put unnecessary obstacles on the map in order to to really get to to squeeze out the juice of convenience from these maps well i hope you've enjoyed this video and i hope it said something that's at least a little bit useful um i i know it really helps me to to sit down and figure out how i would explain this to somebody else instead of relying on my instinct to get me through this i want to come up with a plan that is going to reliably result in the kind of maps that i want to to make people and i'm so excited to get these maps done and get them into people's hands all of my thanks again to all of my wonderful backers uh for the old roads campaign [Music] now i've perhaps over complicated all this but that's what i enjoy doing that's what you're gonna get here um but it's all so much more elegantly put and easier to remember in this piece by yoko ono it's one of my favorites ever and it just says draw a map to get lost [Applause] you

Channel: Map Crow

Views: 49,695

Keywords: how to design maps for games, how to design maps, how to draw isometric maps

Id: 0gc-NUOhtSo

Length: 17min 44sec (1064 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 23 2021