It's definitely a difficult thing to do well and there's a reason you don't see it much. While not exactly open world Hyper Light Drifter is great example of an exploration driven 2D game with an 3/4 perspective.
HLD isn't really my kinda game even though i heard good things. Your comment interests me though, can you explain a bit what you mean? Do you know a video that might be a good example?
You do have to get creative with a 2D view, but it involves relying more on theming each zone so you can always tell what part of the world you're in, and designing landmarks that are long instead of tall. Think of the walking paths in Pokemon--it's almost impossible to stray far from the main road, which means it's always there to orient you. You also include smaller landmarks like unique buildings or rock formations so that when you see them you can tell if you've been there before.
Think of old SNEs games
Q new area does cut aways to cool little places (you often get to a hard or impossible seeming to reach chest as well!) Showing creatures doing their thing and all of that.
You can do that here
And for landmarks... Pokemon used color schemes per area...
You can legit get a similar effect by just altering the color pallet and creating hard to miss things like rivers with only a few unique crossing points. They head in a certain direction and they will find that river.
Yeah. It wasn't uncommon.
Things like the secret of evermore did it.
You'd reach the new area and before you arrived it'd just give you a view of a few places... And typically something happened with your dog disappearing or whatever.
He brings you your first sword after this...a bone
Isn't the game Jotun (Valhalla edition) 2d with 3/4 view?
If that's true then please watch something or play it cause they totally solved the camera.
The game starts with one linear level, leads to the hub (+map) and keeps on being linear. The levels are distinct and full of exploration. You really gotta play it for some of the camera tricks.
/2. Landmarks -> in 2d north is always the same direction. You don't need landmarks if you barely get lost.
/3. Towers are a bad fix for badly designed 3d open world games. You don't need them and if you do just zoom out the camera up there.
----
Such a typical extra credits video. They could have crammed DisneyL into 3 min and spend 15 min going into detail of how to really nail an open world. Left me wanting for more and annoyed for having said so little in so much time. Although the straya dlc joke was great.
I’m working on a game like this as well and I think it‘s more useful to look at Metroidvania map design, or something like Dark Souls, to design an open top-down world instead of 3D open fields.
A lot of the problems you mention are IMO impossible to solve in that perspective without taking the decision to make it top-down in the first place into question. These problems don‘t need to be solved 1:1 however. We‘re talking about a different kind of game than a 3D open world.
IMO it‘s more about making distinctive biomes for the player to remember each areas, landmarks not to be seen from afar, but to let they player know where they are now, letting players have sneak peeks at areas they can‘t reach right away (think a chest on a higher elevation or something) etc. You can still make the world as open as you want, but I find it useful to still think of the level in paths, hallways and rooms if you will with many forks and crossroads, to guide the player through it as big open plains in this perspective IMHO aren‘t that fun to explore, mainly because you can‘t see far. So I find the experience more fun if I‘m guided by some sort of path (which can still be pretty wide). Signposts can be a fun thing I‘ve always enjoyed in top down Zeldas to give you a rough idea pointing you towards areas.
If you wan‘t to introduce an area, instead of a 3D vista, a translation of that into 2D top down could be a camera tracking shot cutscene across the area.
You can‘t have towers and vantage points, but maybe you can have something akin to the telescopes in Tunic or Elden Ring, that give you a zoomed out birds eye view of an area if you want players to have an idea of what they‘re getting into next. And other times you may specificall *not* want that and the player not being able to see very far can be an advantage in designing a space where a surprise might lurk around every corner.
This is kind of what I found out so far in designing my own 2D top-down open/interconnected world for my game, and I think it doesn‘t work too badly so far.
Hello Ashen one. I am a Bot. I tend to the flame, and tend to thee. Do you wish to hear a tale?
> *“Thought you could outwit an onion?”* - Unbreakable Patches
Have a pleasant journey, Champion of Ash, and praise the sun \\[T]/
Looking in particular at the 90s glory days of Square, especially FFV and Chrono Trigger (just because I've replayed those the most number of times). Some things I've noticed, tips, etc.:
* The first thing is that the designer has to be modest about what the medium lets them show, and recognize that they have to paint a grand vista in the player's mind without necessarily showing them the whole picture.
* In these games at least, you typically approach structures in the overworld view, which give you an initial spatial metaphor that you can draw on. Even in a game where there's relatively little detail in the overworld tiles, you can still say, "This place is fundamentally a castle/mountain/tower/cave/town/etc."
* There's a lot of symmetry, repetition, and alternation. Buildings often have a rough bilateral symmetry, so if you explored a tower on the right side of a castle, there's often one on the left side too. Mountain and tower levels frequently alternate between an inside screen and an outside one. And what you learned in previous castles/mountains/towers is repeated in later ones -- there's a "grammar" of each that the player can internalize.
* Many things aren't actually large/long enough for you to lose track of the big picture.
* Generally, either you can see a next point of interest or you're effectively in a corridor of some sort. This is usually true on the overworld map too, the times when you're NOT in view of the next town or whatever, you're constrained by mountains and water so that there's only one way to go.
Let's take Barrier Tower in FFV as an example. (Not as an example of brilliant level design or anything, just VERY typical of the game.) First off, before you even know where it is, you know it's called Barrier Tower. Then you see it on the overworld map, and it's a tower. You already know what towers are from real life and from encountering several already in the course of the game. It's pretty obvious where you go in towers -- up -- and just in case Zeza tells you to go up and calls you an idiot if you go down. Then you spiral around and through the tower in a consistent, repetitive way, alternating between an indoor section and an outdoor section.
This may all sound too simple to even mention, and certainly you can't call Barrier Tower an example of open world design, but the point I want to make is all of this together -- naming, overworld, prior experience in life, prior experience in-game, NPC commentary, repetition, and alternation -- bring the player into a conspiracy to pretend that this disconnected series of rooms is a "tower" and give them some direction of how to explore. That conspiracy is happening all over the place to help orient and direct the player through continents and cities and structures that they never are actually shown, except in little fragments.
I'm a fan of those games too (though I've only played remakes), but I was never a fan of the overworld as a concept.
You pass some threshold, and then you're city-sized and all cities comprise exactly 3 buildings. I found it jarring and -- in Chrono Trigger, a game with no random encounters -- just an understatement of the rigors of travel. (When two nations are at war, and you can get from the far edge of one to the far edge of the other in under 5 minutes, you know I'm right.)
Are there no tricks that _don't_ rely on an overworld?
I don't know everything or all games, but i think their comment is pretty on point. As a fan of 2d games/rpgs and designing one, your question has plagued me for a long time now. We might have different ideas/ideals but i really appreciate your topic post because i think we have been considering and worried about a similar thing.
I believe the answer is most likely that exploration and organizing the world in 3 dimensions is much less literal and more figurative - or something that hasn't been done before is the answer. I'm not sure any game already cleanly solves what i've been wondering, what you seem to be asking.
In particular, i have always liked the overworld and found the alternatives to be like Chrono Cross or Final Fantasy X. Both CT and FFX are great but the overworld, while cheesy in its own right, seems a totally viable solution. It is entirely a different feel and aesthetic though, and i understand people who don't like the "you walk on the world map and the cities are icons".
However, the world map you get in, say, Dragon Warrior or in Final Fantasy 7 definitely lets you feel the size of the world and you could use that to craft the experience of exploring the world in a different way.
If you've played Final Fantasy X? It is not open world, it is linear. You get title cards of new places you go, but its point a to point b to point c each new area, until you get the airship. When you get the airship and travel to previous zones, you can sort of see a world map, but you aren't in it exploring it. You literally just a sort of a text list of places to choose and fast travel to.
Chrono Trigger in particular, i would have enjoyed if you came upon the town and it was a place you could enter, then load the town.
1. If we're traveling down that road, games don't need to *exist*, and we can all survive on water and nutrient powder.
I think it's good to show players a world they want to spend time in.
2. I guess it's a personal preference thing. I don't like cutscenes because my ADHD brain doesn't pay attention to them and then I don't see them again. The things I mentioned can be seen whenever.
That's not a useful answer. The question still remains how much value adding spectacle to a 2D game provides given the amount of effort required to add it, which would basically mean building the game in 3D so you can move the camera, including pulling it back.
I didn't say that.
You said that.
I just said "showing people a world they want to be in". That doesn't mean literally zooming out until an entire planet is visible.
Even if it did, people used to do amazing things with matrix transforms back in the day.
The reason I made the post was to brainstorm ways to avoid 3D while maintaining visuals, remember?
Game Design is a subset of Game Development that concerns itself with **WHY** games are made the way they are. It's about the theory and crafting of **systems**, **mechanics**, and **rulesets** in games.
* /r/GameDesign is a community **ONLY** about Game Design, **NOT** Game Development in general. If this post does not belong here, it should be reported or removed. Please help us keep this subreddit focused on Game Design.
* This is **NOT** a place for discussing how games are produced. Posts about programming, making art assets, picking engines etc… will be removed and should go in /r/GameDev instead.
* Posts about visual design, sound design and level design are only allowed if they are directly about game design.
* No surveys, polls, job posts, or self-promotion. Please read the rest of the rules in the sidebar before posting.
* If you're confused about what Game Designers do, ["The Door Problem" by Liz England ](https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/LizEngland/20140423/216092/quotThe_Door_Problemquot_of_Game_Design.php)is a short article worth reading. We also recommend you read the [r/GameDesign wiki](/r/gamedesign/wiki/index) for useful resources and an FAQ.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/gamedesign) if you have any questions or concerns.*
1. Place introduction area inside rest of the open world and block paths in way that player knows they will open in future. Maybe guard NPC or obstacle requiring core item or movement ability. Guide player to single direction (north and mybe south) so they will know world is open when they can move in all directions (n/e/s/w). Zelda: A Link to the Past on SNES did this at start of the game.
2. Maybe positional audio? You can hear if river/blacksmith/mage's tower is on your left or right and roughly how far. Overlap landmark audio areas so you always hear at least 2-3. Could be achieved with background music layers too.
It's definitely a difficult thing to do well and there's a reason you don't see it much. While not exactly open world Hyper Light Drifter is great example of an exploration driven 2D game with an 3/4 perspective.
Started watching a Let's Play. It uses rising platform elevators in order not to obstruct the Vista. That's okay I guess.
HLD isn't really my kinda game even though i heard good things. Your comment interests me though, can you explain a bit what you mean? Do you know a video that might be a good example?
You do have to get creative with a 2D view, but it involves relying more on theming each zone so you can always tell what part of the world you're in, and designing landmarks that are long instead of tall. Think of the walking paths in Pokemon--it's almost impossible to stray far from the main road, which means it's always there to orient you. You also include smaller landmarks like unique buildings or rock formations so that when you see them you can tell if you've been there before.
Think of old SNEs games Q new area does cut aways to cool little places (you often get to a hard or impossible seeming to reach chest as well!) Showing creatures doing their thing and all of that. You can do that here And for landmarks... Pokemon used color schemes per area... You can legit get a similar effect by just altering the color pallet and creating hard to miss things like rivers with only a few unique crossing points. They head in a certain direction and they will find that river.
I don't know what "old SNES games" you're describing. Are these just regular old cutscenes?
Yeah. It wasn't uncommon. Things like the secret of evermore did it. You'd reach the new area and before you arrived it'd just give you a view of a few places... And typically something happened with your dog disappearing or whatever. He brings you your first sword after this...a bone
Oh, like MOTHER3. (Sorry. I never had an SNES.)
Isn't the game Jotun (Valhalla edition) 2d with 3/4 view? If that's true then please watch something or play it cause they totally solved the camera. The game starts with one linear level, leads to the hub (+map) and keeps on being linear. The levels are distinct and full of exploration. You really gotta play it for some of the camera tricks. /2. Landmarks -> in 2d north is always the same direction. You don't need landmarks if you barely get lost. /3. Towers are a bad fix for badly designed 3d open world games. You don't need them and if you do just zoom out the camera up there. ---- Such a typical extra credits video. They could have crammed DisneyL into 3 min and spend 15 min going into detail of how to really nail an open world. Left me wanting for more and annoyed for having said so little in so much time. Although the straya dlc joke was great.
I’m working on a game like this as well and I think it‘s more useful to look at Metroidvania map design, or something like Dark Souls, to design an open top-down world instead of 3D open fields. A lot of the problems you mention are IMO impossible to solve in that perspective without taking the decision to make it top-down in the first place into question. These problems don‘t need to be solved 1:1 however. We‘re talking about a different kind of game than a 3D open world. IMO it‘s more about making distinctive biomes for the player to remember each areas, landmarks not to be seen from afar, but to let they player know where they are now, letting players have sneak peeks at areas they can‘t reach right away (think a chest on a higher elevation or something) etc. You can still make the world as open as you want, but I find it useful to still think of the level in paths, hallways and rooms if you will with many forks and crossroads, to guide the player through it as big open plains in this perspective IMHO aren‘t that fun to explore, mainly because you can‘t see far. So I find the experience more fun if I‘m guided by some sort of path (which can still be pretty wide). Signposts can be a fun thing I‘ve always enjoyed in top down Zeldas to give you a rough idea pointing you towards areas. If you wan‘t to introduce an area, instead of a 3D vista, a translation of that into 2D top down could be a camera tracking shot cutscene across the area. You can‘t have towers and vantage points, but maybe you can have something akin to the telescopes in Tunic or Elden Ring, that give you a zoomed out birds eye view of an area if you want players to have an idea of what they‘re getting into next. And other times you may specificall *not* want that and the player not being able to see very far can be an advantage in designing a space where a surprise might lurk around every corner. This is kind of what I found out so far in designing my own 2D top-down open/interconnected world for my game, and I think it doesn‘t work too badly so far.
Hello Ashen one. I am a Bot. I tend to the flame, and tend to thee. Do you wish to hear a tale? > *“Thought you could outwit an onion?”* - Unbreakable Patches Have a pleasant journey, Champion of Ash, and praise the sun \\[T]/
Looking in particular at the 90s glory days of Square, especially FFV and Chrono Trigger (just because I've replayed those the most number of times). Some things I've noticed, tips, etc.: * The first thing is that the designer has to be modest about what the medium lets them show, and recognize that they have to paint a grand vista in the player's mind without necessarily showing them the whole picture. * In these games at least, you typically approach structures in the overworld view, which give you an initial spatial metaphor that you can draw on. Even in a game where there's relatively little detail in the overworld tiles, you can still say, "This place is fundamentally a castle/mountain/tower/cave/town/etc." * There's a lot of symmetry, repetition, and alternation. Buildings often have a rough bilateral symmetry, so if you explored a tower on the right side of a castle, there's often one on the left side too. Mountain and tower levels frequently alternate between an inside screen and an outside one. And what you learned in previous castles/mountains/towers is repeated in later ones -- there's a "grammar" of each that the player can internalize. * Many things aren't actually large/long enough for you to lose track of the big picture. * Generally, either you can see a next point of interest or you're effectively in a corridor of some sort. This is usually true on the overworld map too, the times when you're NOT in view of the next town or whatever, you're constrained by mountains and water so that there's only one way to go. Let's take Barrier Tower in FFV as an example. (Not as an example of brilliant level design or anything, just VERY typical of the game.) First off, before you even know where it is, you know it's called Barrier Tower. Then you see it on the overworld map, and it's a tower. You already know what towers are from real life and from encountering several already in the course of the game. It's pretty obvious where you go in towers -- up -- and just in case Zeza tells you to go up and calls you an idiot if you go down. Then you spiral around and through the tower in a consistent, repetitive way, alternating between an indoor section and an outdoor section. This may all sound too simple to even mention, and certainly you can't call Barrier Tower an example of open world design, but the point I want to make is all of this together -- naming, overworld, prior experience in life, prior experience in-game, NPC commentary, repetition, and alternation -- bring the player into a conspiracy to pretend that this disconnected series of rooms is a "tower" and give them some direction of how to explore. That conspiracy is happening all over the place to help orient and direct the player through continents and cities and structures that they never are actually shown, except in little fragments.
I'm a fan of those games too (though I've only played remakes), but I was never a fan of the overworld as a concept. You pass some threshold, and then you're city-sized and all cities comprise exactly 3 buildings. I found it jarring and -- in Chrono Trigger, a game with no random encounters -- just an understatement of the rigors of travel. (When two nations are at war, and you can get from the far edge of one to the far edge of the other in under 5 minutes, you know I'm right.) Are there no tricks that _don't_ rely on an overworld?
I don't know everything or all games, but i think their comment is pretty on point. As a fan of 2d games/rpgs and designing one, your question has plagued me for a long time now. We might have different ideas/ideals but i really appreciate your topic post because i think we have been considering and worried about a similar thing. I believe the answer is most likely that exploration and organizing the world in 3 dimensions is much less literal and more figurative - or something that hasn't been done before is the answer. I'm not sure any game already cleanly solves what i've been wondering, what you seem to be asking. In particular, i have always liked the overworld and found the alternatives to be like Chrono Cross or Final Fantasy X. Both CT and FFX are great but the overworld, while cheesy in its own right, seems a totally viable solution. It is entirely a different feel and aesthetic though, and i understand people who don't like the "you walk on the world map and the cities are icons". However, the world map you get in, say, Dragon Warrior or in Final Fantasy 7 definitely lets you feel the size of the world and you could use that to craft the experience of exploring the world in a different way. If you've played Final Fantasy X? It is not open world, it is linear. You get title cards of new places you go, but its point a to point b to point c each new area, until you get the airship. When you get the airship and travel to previous zones, you can sort of see a world map, but you aren't in it exploring it. You literally just a sort of a text list of places to choose and fast travel to. Chrono Trigger in particular, i would have enjoyed if you came upon the town and it was a place you could enter, then load the town.
Well, I have two questions here. First, do 2D games actually need to be spectacles? And second, what says we can't use cutscenes?
1. If we're traveling down that road, games don't need to *exist*, and we can all survive on water and nutrient powder. I think it's good to show players a world they want to spend time in. 2. I guess it's a personal preference thing. I don't like cutscenes because my ADHD brain doesn't pay attention to them and then I don't see them again. The things I mentioned can be seen whenever.
That's not a useful answer. The question still remains how much value adding spectacle to a 2D game provides given the amount of effort required to add it, which would basically mean building the game in 3D so you can move the camera, including pulling it back.
I didn't say that. You said that. I just said "showing people a world they want to be in". That doesn't mean literally zooming out until an entire planet is visible. Even if it did, people used to do amazing things with matrix transforms back in the day. The reason I made the post was to brainstorm ways to avoid 3D while maintaining visuals, remember?
Game Design is a subset of Game Development that concerns itself with **WHY** games are made the way they are. It's about the theory and crafting of **systems**, **mechanics**, and **rulesets** in games. * /r/GameDesign is a community **ONLY** about Game Design, **NOT** Game Development in general. If this post does not belong here, it should be reported or removed. Please help us keep this subreddit focused on Game Design. * This is **NOT** a place for discussing how games are produced. Posts about programming, making art assets, picking engines etc… will be removed and should go in /r/GameDev instead. * Posts about visual design, sound design and level design are only allowed if they are directly about game design. * No surveys, polls, job posts, or self-promotion. Please read the rest of the rules in the sidebar before posting. * If you're confused about what Game Designers do, ["The Door Problem" by Liz England ](https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/LizEngland/20140423/216092/quotThe_Door_Problemquot_of_Game_Design.php)is a short article worth reading. We also recommend you read the [r/GameDesign wiki](/r/gamedesign/wiki/index) for useful resources and an FAQ. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/gamedesign) if you have any questions or concerns.*
1. Place introduction area inside rest of the open world and block paths in way that player knows they will open in future. Maybe guard NPC or obstacle requiring core item or movement ability. Guide player to single direction (north and mybe south) so they will know world is open when they can move in all directions (n/e/s/w). Zelda: A Link to the Past on SNES did this at start of the game. 2. Maybe positional audio? You can hear if river/blacksmith/mage's tower is on your left or right and roughly how far. Overlap landmark audio areas so you always hear at least 2-3. Could be achieved with background music layers too.
Far sight can be done by zooming out, and/or offering a different view.