E18 Route 4 Step By Step Starting (Patreon)

hi i exist and we're moved in and internet kind of exists but not entirely and we still have a lot of unpacking and furniture-wrangling to do but
in the mean time
have some pictures

as i've talked about before, i always start each area with a sketch on paper. typically i'd post the paper sketch too, but that's packed up somewhere in god knows what box so uh no
at least not right now
but the boxes here are basically individual maps laid out according to how i sketched out each area on the paper, i had already planned for off-shoots that would change based on the field, and that the path to the story would require no field-changing.
and naturally, the idea for route 4 was mainly just a bunch of rock climb things. i'd blush to call it a 'puzzle' but i think between the hopping rocks and field changing stuff we got that covered okay.

this is a bigger leap forward conceptually than anything; all that's happened here is that these grey lines using a whatever tile are marking the areas that i decide i need to separate into different maps. a lot of the purpose of separating the maps was to make the rock climbs feel bigger and more disjointed, but in particular in allowed me some freedoms to 'cheat' on a few places.
this currently isn't showing the offshoot maps yet but that'll happen later and i'll explain what i mean by cheating

here i mark out the map boundaries according to what the player would see past the edge of the walkable area (otherwise you'd be able to see one area from another-- if they were kept on the same map file anyway-- and if not, just black space. either way is notgucci)
and then i also mark diagonals for where i need each rock climb. most of those were figured out on paper too so it's just a matter of spacing them here.

the existing part of route 4 is copied into the bottom left so that i can be sure the cliffs coming off of it are consistent with the top part. that was a really cute (read: naive) notion on my part to think that would work out for the full route. you can see how it outline peaks on the bottom part, and on the top i completed the cliff detail for the sake of seeing how it all connects

continuing cliff work from left to right with a focus on outlining the walkable areas and making elevation consistent across boundaries. the waterfalls are pretty key to get in early because they're a pain to work around; you can't have blank spaces next to any part of a waterfall so everything has to be tight and gross and crowded
i actually messed up the bottom part there and had to work around it by having the waterfall.. uh, fall, back into the mountain. the rest was marked from paper though since i knew i'd have those falls connect back into agate. 

the glass workstation is structured out with temporary graphics before i make new ones. and the boundaries for the sidequest maps are now (mostly) marked properly.

re: cheating-- if you look on the top left, you can see those twin peaks on the bottom left marked section have nothing behind them (or rather, just sky in game). so does the peak on the sidequest map above it (where lycanium will be... / is). if i were doing this all on one map with fluid cliffs i would not be able to get away with that because that top peak would need to have cliffs all the way down to support it from floating, meaning the lower twin peaks would have a very crowded cliffy background instead of the prettier sky
(teknite range rowlet map is an example of where that kind of thing is an issue, but i use darker cliff colours to get around it there instead)

maps split up some more, the water is finished out, and also all of the rest of the cliffs at least for outlining the player areas. the hopping puzzles are done at this point too so that i can make adjustments in the boundary as necessary.

re: cheating again-- you can see to the upper right of the lower hopping pool area the cliffs don't actually quite match up there. it was a noble effort on my part, but ultimately pointless since it'd be separated anyway so i didn't try too hard to make it all work.

after this point the maps are split up into smaller individual ones since continuing to try and do it here despite those inconsistencies would just create more trouble. after splitting it up, i then put it to kanaya, who filled in all the cliffs outside the playable areas, and then it's passed back to me. 

since i worked on this stuff asynchronously with kanaya as she was finishing other maps, and since it had already been split up, i don't have any more cool screens like this, but the basic process after getting finished cliffs from her was, for each smaller map,

• mark out areas for snow (as opposed to grass) and fill them in)
• trees. trees everywhere. PS: this tileset's trees are stupid to map with; just tedious.
• other obstacles and wild grass across the ground to keep it interesting
• new graphics where necessary, replacing temporary ones
• replace placehold rock climbs with actual ones
• some basic event stuff
• copy the map and make the alternate snow/melted versions as appropriate, which is basically just pasting over with the other set of trees and grass and stuff.

...and although that might sound like a lot, once the trees are done it's all very quick. some tweaks came in for troubleshooting the hop puzzles and things around the snivy event, but other than that, it's pretty much the route 4 you know today.

--

we don't get our own proper internet until the 5th and i still have some handful of stuff to get going in terms of coordinating picking furniture up and rental trucks and moving my cat over here and i currently don't even know when that's going to happen becuase we're waiting on a nine year old to decide if she wants to give us her dresser or not
which she has to decide tomorrow i guess.
where did this nine year old come from? i barely know myself. but hey, free stuff.