Our maps, especially our town maps, tend to be pretty big. Proportionately, they’re only a bit larger than EarthBound’s equivilents. But since our graphical style is larger as a whole, this carries over to our town design, too. Our humble starting town of Belring is 5000 by 3120 pixels! What winds up happening in the initial transit from sketch to Tiled map is we have a lot of negative space. Balancing this out between having clearly defined borders and paths while also keeping space for enemies is tough, but that’s what Pik has been up to. These kind of improvements happen over time, where we notice ways pre-existing routes can be made more interesting or efficent.

It looks good here, too!

Paths are useful for this work, so they’re included in sketches. Also included are train tracks, which play an obvious role. They add another layer of making us ensure there’s interesting scenery to watch while you ride the rails. In response to what some of you may be asking, yes! You can ride the rails. Here’s a full transit from one city to another:

The uncompressed version of this .gif can be found here. Note: it’s 11MB.

You gotta earn the right, though. Deluxe passes are expensive and good for ten one-way trips. Of course, if you’re strong enough, you can just walk along the rails no problem.

Three more train stations remain until the whole country of Pleiades is connected by rail, and with that we’re pulling into the end of this week’s update. Thanks for stopping by, and we’ll see you again on the 29th!