Characteristics of a few mobile game maps -Part I

In this series of posts, I would evaluate the characteristics of maps of a few popular games: Bubble Witch Saga 2, Jelly Splash, etc, from the point view of an art producer. This is part 1.

Junxue Li, Blogger

June 19, 2015

3 Min Read

Please note: in this post I would use art works from some popular games to elucidate the ideas of the article. As our team also creates map art, please don’t mistake that the art work in the post are created by our team. And a big thanks to those developers who had released those great games!

Today almost every mobile game has a map, in this series of posts, I would evaluate the characteristics of maps of a few popular games: Bubble Witch 2 Saga, Jelly Splash, etc, from the point view of an art producer. If you’re a game developer who’s planning to have a map for your game, or an artist, this series is for you.

I would start with a few general things for developers to consider, and then in the next posts give some detailed evaluation to some specific games. Those games I choose to evaluate are quite typical in some ways, that could be a good reference for making your own maps.

A few things developers should consider:

Budget: Every developer start with a planned budget, I think this is the most sensitive issue to her/him. The single most important factor which influent budget, is art style/detail level.

See this picture, you can easily see which map is cheap/expensive:

Story/Theme: The story of most mobile games is simple enough, but there is story. No doubt the appearance of the game is largely decided by the story. And the map configuration should follow the story flow and settings.

For most F2P games, the game is basically designed in endless mode. So how you choose the story/theme affects how you add updates very much. For example, if the game is “Lucy’s World Tour”, there’s infinity things you can add as updates; If it’s “Murder in Easter Island”, you may not be able to find much to make updates.

Art style/production method: Art style, budget and story are linked to each other. Generally speaking, simpler art style is cheaper. And nowadays most game maps are cartoon style digital paintings, richer or simpler. And there’re a few games make maps by 3D render.

Map configuration format: Today it seems most of the games adopt vertical scroll configuration for the map, an infinitely long scroll that you can scrub up and down. However, there are many types of map configuration also. For example, in Cookie JAM each area is an independent island.

You may want to choose the configuration that fit your game best. For more details on this topic, please see this article.

The density of how level nodes are packed: How much it would cost you, say, to make maps for 20 levels, 80 levels? It’s partly depends on how dense you would pack the level nodes in the map.

Planning and how to connect map zones: For some good games, they continue to add new maps each month, all the zones are well balanced in game play and art quality, and the newly added maps zones always connect seamlessly to the old zones. If you want to achieve this, you need good planning and production management for current zones and zones to come.

For some tips of map planning, please see this article.

In this Series:

P1: Developer’s General Concern

P2: Bubble Witch 2 Saga

P3: Cookie JAM

P4: To be continued…