Hi everyone! I'm interested in how other game designers create locations and settings for their games, so don't hesitate and write it here!

To get things going, I'll begin.

I mostly design the setting and locations of my games based on places in the real world, with an element of fantasy to them, to make them look like a place you could actually visit. I find it important to have a balance of settings in the game (as in, not having a single type of area/place/terrain/whatever). I have to mention I hate medieval fantasy (I find it too limited in the sense of having to stick to a certain low level of technology and society), so even if there are medieval locations in my games, they serve as an old-city district.

Some examples:

Elysium: A metropolis based on the crotatian cities Split and Trogir. It stretches in a N-S direction on the western shore of a continent and is roughly 50 kilometres long and about 15 kilometres wide. Its' northern part houses an industrial-commercial district and a historical oldtown, in the middle, there are mostly residental and agricultural areas, and the southern end is a tourist area. The entire city is surrounded by tall mountains from the east and the north and thick forests from the south and is protected by a magitech barrier as protection from the savage wildlife and harsh climate of the outside. It's the home of the game's protagonists and serves a purpose like Midgar from Final Fantasy VII.

Yggdrasil: A giant tree on a small and lonely island in the vast ocean. It's inhabited by tiny insect-like humans, the Liefa, who live among the tree's leaves. It doesn't resemble any real-world locations. The liefas use technology that could be described as the mixture of steampunk and organic: the city centre of the place can be reached by wooden trains and is carved into the tree itself. Yggdrasil itself is the "last resort" of mankind, and is the result of a desperate experiment 400 years before the game's beginning, when the amount of habitable land was drastically decreased.

Lake Glyen-Haramu: A place inspired by the hungarian lake Balaton and Velden in Austria, a lake surrounded by summer houses and smaller towns. It's the first area of a character's individual story, and returns as the final dungeon in a "memoria" form. Two characters, a boy and a girl, spent their summers at this lake and fell in love with each other, sparking the game's plot itself.

I have yet to make an original game, not due to limitations, but more due to lack of desire. After I start and finish my three game trilogy, I plan on embarking on an original game.

But that's at least a minimum of two years off.

In any case, I base most of my locations off of places that are already well known or based in the FE game series. Sacae is a land of plains, the Dread Isle is an island that even pirates fear, etc etc.

when I design a location, I consider it from the top-down eco-system style. This means that I often spend a lot more time organizing all the locations I'll need in a simple document before I actually hit the map maker. (This is, by the way, how I've done my D&D campaigns in the past)

For the actual geography, I found this article immensely helpful.

I take an element of an existing game location out of context and build a new environment upon it. (could be a gate, some kind of ridiculously long bridge, a cliff shaped in a certain way, the lighting in that area, the sounds that play in the background, an interesting visual effect... anything)
Creating a simple backstory and listening to fitting music helps.

I just draw random shapes in MS Paint and then try to design a area based off it.

For me, I first create a map. The way I do it I allow the location to form on its own. When the map is created then I have a good idea of where I want to put cities. From there I can map out journeys.

For me, journeys are the paths that everyone takes, not just my main characters. By focusing on many people I can create a more complex and complete story.

Here’s an example of my map making. This is a dungeon in the game I’m designing. It’s done in photoshop so it won’t be used in the actual game, but from it know where I need to have things and what things I need to have.

It started as just a simple block outline to convey the parts of the dungeon that were connected in their puzzles and mechanics.

Original


Then it evolved into this:

Finished Map


What I got from this is that it’s a dungeon only in the sence that there are some ruined walls and its an enclosed space. Theres some kind of fire creature in the middle that needs to be taken care of, there are some rivers, and the last room (1-2) has some dangerous cliffs.

Yay cliffs.

Pretty much my method, except with pencil and paper. I also add little markers that indicate teleports/transfers, locked doors, or any special events that happen in a map Actually, i guess this is more about dungeons than areas.

I wish I'd saved more progress shots on my last map so I had more shots to show. My methods are a little different because I'm recreating an area that exists in 3D space and representing it in 2D space.

The first thing I do is build a reference shot of the entire area:



The next thing I do is draw a 16x16 grid so I know that what I'm drawing will adhere to the movement restrictions of rm2k3. Then I study my reference pic for a time and decide the angle I want to go with, as most of FF7's backgrounds use an isometric viewpoint so theres usually 2 choices and I pick the one that would show the most detail. Having made that decision I bootup the game and look at Cloud's movement around the map and then I mapout a box containing the movement restrictions on a 2D plane. And then I draw the rest of the doodads around it:



Then I colour (and make some adjustments to my original outline too):



Then there's a few more stages such as putting the parts that are supposed to go over the character into a tileset, and I animate any parts of the map and either implement them with events or in some cases (such as the sign in this map) I have a looping battle animation.

just a question, I see you have shadows cast in your map, do those shadows actually reflect on your character when they walk through it?

Nah they don't, they didn't in the original FF7 either.

a convenient excuse, my friend!

by the way, that's a very good methodology, I think. but it's somewhat limited in when it can be used. In cases where you have to create a brand new location, how would you go about it?

When I map, I look at pictures of the same type of the place that I am making so I can get the geography of the place right. Like if I'm making a forest, I'll look at pictures of the certain type of forest I'm making to see how nature works and everything. It really gives some insight and helps mapping
Of course, I've never finished a GREAT project, so yeah xD

If I was making my own game I'd probably do it with chipsets and not a background, as while it can have amazing results its very time consuming. I'm one of those people who go in with a loose of idea of what I want and just throw myself into the map making and let inspiration do the work for me with minimal planning.

The way I do it involved no planning at all and uses a picture. The coastlines are generated in photoshop and then I just go crazy with it, Like I did with the map up there. Total accident the way that happened.

Using a parallax background had awesome results for me

this was an in-game shot from a project I was doing a while ago:

When I was making this I just put things in places which inspired more places and so on. That's why I make a background instead of use chipsets because I can do more, do it quickly, and I feel I actually have more freedom with it.

And you can't really make realistic coastlines in RPG Maker ^^