Setting up Navigation: A Couple Lessons Learned

While building 'The Sightless Eye' for Spore, I had the goals of not enforcing certain play styles (ex. combat only) and building the planet the way I think it would naturally set itself up.  These both contributed to difficult and boring navigation for the player.

To allow various play styles, I kept the objectives as simple as possible.  For example, instead of requiring a player to "Enter the Cave" and "Kill the Shamen", I just required the player to "Kill the Shamen" and let the going to the cave part be implied.  However, since the mini map only pointed to the actual shamen if "Enter the Cave" wasn't an objective, it makes it difficult to find the cave entrance.  If the player goes off the implied path, they might spend a long time just circling the mountain that envelopes the cave.

The mountains block direct access to the objective, so a player may have to circle most of them if they don't find the entrance right away.

A place that sets itself up naturally tends to spread out more than a conceived setting.  Two towns wouldn't naturally be a stone's throw from each other.  Placing towns and objectives a distance apart in Spore wouldn't be so bad if the mini-map objective pointer wasn't so terrible. Because it portrays an actual (relatively small) sphere, instead of the usual 2D plane, it doesn't account well for the bends, especially at the poles.  The pointer will generally guide you at an arced path to the objective.  Long walks made longer make for boring sessions of just holding 'w'.

Notice the mini-map pointer points perpendicular to the shortest path (the white arrows) thanks to imposing a 3D plane on a 2D graphic.

The navigation flow of a 'natural' setting.

Since I realized this near the end of making the adventure, I tried to rectify it by placing big giant arrows that pointed in the right direction. Sadly, I was already near the complexity maximum, so I couldn't add many arrows, and the ones I did were only useful if you were already on the right path.

The lone arrow tells you to just go through
the bush and hope for the best.

Better arrow placement through town to a followable road..

For "The Secret of the Vizjerei" I made less wilderness paths (more actual pathways), compacted the objective locales and placed more effective arrows.  Overall, this worked without compromising the feel of the adventure. Sure, if you thought about it, those abandoned ruins are awfully close to town, but the suspension of disbelief covers that.  Adding actual paths also added more detail to the map.  The treks between objectives are better paced and more enjoyable in the second adventure.

The navigation flow of a 'conceived' setting.  Also note the use of pathways between locales.

I still want to do a better job at incorporating direction into dialogue, but I've taken some good lessons from building the first adventure applied them to the second.