I know it sounds weird said like that, but it suddenly became clear to me yesterday why I start so many mapping project but finish so few (heck, Aria Of Sorrow as been sitting on my hard drive for weeks with only the final layout and lettering left to do).
I love the process of mapping. That is, I love playing a game with the specific intent of playing through every areas, trying to find every secret, and assembling a map to help me better understand the spatial relationship between them all. I love finding out if, say, the interior of a vehicle or building matches with its exterior.
Of course, there's a big aesthetic aspect to it all which tends to guide which game I'm interested in, but the actual discovery and assembly is what I love doing most.
There's also a trill in the challenges involved with certain maps that have multiple scrolling layers, transparencies, moving parts, special programming effects, etc. That can be really stimulating as you struggle to find a way to tile a seemingly untilable parallax background, or find the best way to represent a stage with dynamic geography.
But for me, the fun all comes crashing down when the actual assembly is done and the "polishing" phase begins. There's nothing I find more tedious in this hobby than trying to come up with the best map layout, deciding which fonts to use and wasting time trying to extract it, spending hours placing enemies and moving objects, harmonizing colors that use palette cycling effects, wondering what to caption and how, making a map key, etc.
All the extra work is also why I don't want to make gameplay maps. Sometimes, a game can be so complex that finding everything to put it on a map just turns me off of the game completely. That reason is why two other projects of mine have stalled for a long time. The first, Clock Tower (SNES), is because of several cases of randomness in terms of puzzles and item locations which I would have loved to include. The second,S.O.S.(SNES) (a game about a sinking ship taking place during a real-time hour), includes about 70 people you can save in various ways (or can't), depending on your starting character (out of 4) with some appearing or changing status after 20 or 40 minutes with no visible clock available. I don't even want to know how many times I'd have to go through the game to figure out everything and put it all on a map. As it is, I'll probably post a simple geographical map of the ship and not include any of the passengers because of the headache.
You see what I mean by tedious? That's why some maps of mine have been sitting uncompleted for so long. Heck, I was practically done with Heart Of The Alien, the Sega CD sequel to Out Of This World, but I lost interest when deciding how to separate the maps since there are no clear stage delimitation in-game. That's why Aria Of Sorrow has been sitting untouched for weeks, and that one is farther on that most, since I spent hours making an elaborate border for the playable areas and putting together a map key with colors to differentiate between items, bosses, souls, etc. But when came time to settle on the font to use to label the map and a few areas that are maze-like, my mind about just crashed. This wasn't fun or interesting anymore; it was just tedious and incredibly boring (don't worry though, as the realization described in this post has motivated me to force myself into at least finishing this one ASAP).
I also realized that my dad is the same way. He's a big fan of trains and an accomplished railroad modeler, and he's built a number of large layouts when I was a kid. But the only one he ever completely finished was the first one I remember, which took up half our basement when I was four years old. It was covered in buildings, little people and everything was detailed and painted. But afterward, he'd often make plans and get the main part done, that is the wood framework, the mountains and tunnels were shaped with cardboard and often a coating of plaster was applied, all the rails and electrical connections were installed. Then he'd lose interest, run the trains on it for a while and eventually he'd tear it all down, only to start another one a few months later.
See, my dad has always been a great handyman. In fact, he's the exact opposite of the people you can see on Canada's Worst Handyman on TV. He loves building and fixing stuff, but he has no patience for the finishing touches. It's neither challenging nor fun for him, and I think I'm somewhat the same way with game mapping.
I don't know if finally putting my finger on my main problem will help me in the future, but I hope so.
Does anyone else feel similar?
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Current project: Castlevania: Aria Of Sorrow (GBA)
Upcoming project: Castlevania Legends (GB)
