This is an activity that I found myself doing sparingly on my free time. The whole point of doing this is first of all, it's a fun and relaxing activity for me, and secondly, it's to replicate the art of mapping out old video games back when the internet hardly existed. And finally, these projects gives me a reason to play old video games. Sweet.
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| Trust me, you'll need this. |
A mapping project of Metroid for the NES. Playing on a NES Classic mini console. Metroid for the original NES is especially useful due to a lack of an in-game map and having a map available made exploring Zebes a lot less frustrating. Here I try to mark key items and door colors to help first time explorers plan their next destination, instead of aimlessly wandering the labyrinth.
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| My first attempt at mapping. |
This was actually my first attempt at mapping. This is level 1 for The Legend of Zelda on the NES. I figured this would be a good start to practice my mapping skills since the screens move from one grid to the next, which would make counting pixels to connect the maps non-existent. I was happy with how this came out, but wanted to make the map a little bigger since plotting the individual blocks and enemies were somewhat difficult on that little estate.
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| Looks like a child's coloring book. |
This is the level 2 dungeon. This time around I decided to make the rooms a little bigger so that the obstacles, enemies, items, etc. were more visible. I very much liked how it turned out, but it did look more like a work of a child due to the vibrant colors and amateur artwork. This did not bother me as much, but I definitely did want to go for a more minimalist aesthetic. I started to look at some of Jeremy Parish's mapping projects, which he dubbed Cart-tography. This gave me some techniques to minimize my art and only point out necessary objects. If you're looking into mapping old video games yourself, I highly suggest watching his videos to get an idea and pointers on how to start.
I realized after a while that for this game it was unnecessary to plot enemy points since the game randomly generates the enemy locations whenever the room is spawned, so I decided to scrap that on the next map.
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| Very minimal. |
Level 3 dungeon... Now this one came out real nice. So I decided to go the minimal approach and got rid of a lot of unnecessary features. The one big noticeable change was the outer wall color, which made the previous maps look like a bad coloring attempt by a 4 year old. Next, blocks that were not interactive got a cross hash mark to indicate what they were and got more of a blocky aesthetic. Also, in previous maps, I didn't outline anything with a pencil, except for the room itself. This time I decided to draw out the objects first and then color them in. This made it a lot easier to distinguish objects from one another and made it less of a crayola sand box. Finally, I totally scrapped enemy locations.
With less objects and colors, the map became a lot easier to read and was more pleasant to the eyes. Overall, I'm very happy with this design and will probably go forward with this concept, with maybe a little tweak here and there.
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| The dreaded Castlevania Adventures for Game Boy. |
With 3 Zelda maps down, I decided to go a different direction with a 2D platformer, Castlevania Adventures for the Game Boy. Unlike Metroid however, Castlevania was not an exploration type platformer, so I decided to go with a much bigger screen estate to map the game.
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These projects are ongoing and I'll update this post as I make significant progress.
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