Alright, so Snowtown is made up of seven-ish main areas (North Snowtown, Snowtown South, Ripton, Ramsey, Wilmington, Shelton, Keisey -- do we count Undertown, or Downtown? Maybe. Do we count the General Snow Memorial Park? Probably not). I want the city to be big enough that it takes time and effort to get from one area to another, let alone across the entire city (I also want to implement personal vehicles that will be able to auto-travel you to a given location, and public transit that will auto-travel you to specific locations). I also don't want areas to just be a straight line from one end of them to the other, there should be streets branching off from the main road, like in a city (or any other human-habitated area, but you get my point)
However, I also don't want the map made up of a bunch of empty rooms (outside though they may be). If the city is made up of ten segments of street that you have to walk through to get from point A to point B, there should be enough interesting things in all ten segments to justify their existence (which means that a single thing in each room is not enough -- you could easily stack them together and reduce the number of rooms). There is a trick, here -- I do not necessarily need to come up with things to go in the rooms, I just have to create the illusion that I have done so.
This is all a bit different from the StoryNexus SnowRPG in ways that require a lot of thought at this stage -- StoryNexus didn't have roads, each main area was just its own thing that you travelled between with energy points that created the illusion of it taking time-and-effort to do so. But SNSRPG was not a MUD and that simply will not work in this medium. So that's the first main change I have to make to what I've already written for the game
Anyway that's where the graph paper is coming in. I want to come up with a number of "rooms" to shoot for per area and then start drawing out a map for how the "rooms" will connect. I am mulling over sort of,,,
The obvious way to conceptualise this is to think of yourself at a single point on a street. The "room" you're in describes the buildings on either side of the street but you can't see anything a block ahead or behind you, or the things on any neighbouring street
But you could also conceptualise it as existing in a given area, and having knowledge of everything in that area. You know that the pharmacy is around the corner, so you could go there without having to 'go around the corner', it's already within your general perception-area. So rather than each room being a single point, it's giving you the rundown of everything within a, say, 200-foot square. I'm not sure how that would feel to play, but it would mean making the city feel bigger with fewer "rooms"
