Mapping Design Guide
The purpose of this guide is to instruct how to design maps for Paradise. While there are many resources on the technical aspects of mapping, this guide instead focuses on considering mapping from a thematic, functional, and balance perspective.
Design Guidelines
Maps are one of the most visible ways of conveying the world and setting of the server to players. Maps should work to preserve that setting. Paradise Station takes place in a 26th century universe where multiple space-faring species work on stations owned by a pangalactic corporate conglomerate. New maps, ruins, and remaps should make sense within that world.
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Use the appropriate decorative elements and turf types. Department flooring should use their associated colors: red for Security, brown for Cargo, blue for Medbay, and so on. Stations should always use standard walls and reinforced walls, and not e.g. plastitanium walls. Stations should always use standard airlocks, and not e.g. syndicate hatches or Centcomm airlocks.
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Avoid excessive use of decals or floor tile variants. Using too many decals or floor tile variants causes unnecessary visual noise. Only use decals such as warning tape where it is sensible, e.g. around airlocks that lead to space. Decal overuse contributes to maptick slowdown.
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Avoid “Big Room Disease”. “Big Room Disease” refers to areas on a map that are unnecessarily large, empty, and/or square. Rooms should be large enough to handle crew foot traffic and facilitate their use, but no larger. Furniture should be placed appropriately inside rooms, not just lined along their walls. Large rooms should rarely be perfectly square or rectangular.
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Public areas should be interesting. “Interesting” is subjective, but generally, areas such as public hallways should include space for crew interaction; decorations such as posters, flags, and other decorative structures; windows that look out onto space, and floor tiles and decals that delineate the space.
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Use appropriate hall sizes. Primary hallways should be three tiles wide. Arterial hallways off the primary halls should be two tiles wide. Intradepartmental corridors should be one or two tiles wide. Exceptions to this include the Brig, Medbay, and Science, whose main halls can be three tiles wide due to the amount of foot traffic and number of sub departments within their space.
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Properly signpost maintenance areas. “Signposting” refers to environmental factors that make it clear what part of maintenance the player is in. For example, while “med maints” on Cyberiad is the area around medbay, it is also distinguishable from its abandoned cryo tube, medical dufflebag, operating table, and so on. Note however that this signposting does not need to be directly related to nearby departments: for example, mining maints on Cyberiad has a small abandoned gambling room, a laundry room, and several abandoned shower/bathroom areas. This distinguishes it from other maintenance areas despite not directly referencing mining, as players will eventually associate these distinct features with that area of maintenance.
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Ensure continuity of scale. The size of rooms should make sense relative to one another. The chef’s freezer should not be larger than their kitchen. The dorm’s bathroom should not be larger than the Captain’s office. The scale of rooms should make sense for their expected occupancy and purpose. For example, the Heads of Staff Meeting Room should be large enough to seat all staff comfortably around a table, with extra space for navigating foot traffic around the table.
Balance Guidelines
Maps should be an unbiased playing field for players, whether ordinary crew, silicon, antagonists, or midrounds. Players should not be able to rely on a specific station layout to gain unique advantages over other players.
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Maintain consistent loot counts and opportunities. The amount of maintenance loot drops should remain consistent, with a slight scaling factor based on expected station population. There should be no “treasure troves” or hoards of loot hidden that can only be found with specific map knowledge. Department supplies should be consistent across maps. Do not place any syndicate items/traitor tools on station; always use the provided maintenance loot spawners to maintain proper statistical likelihood of rare loot spawns.
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Use appropriate reinforcement. Most of the station should be delineated with ordinary walls and reinforced windows. Only secure areas should use reinforced walls and grilled spawners, and electrified windows should only be used in rare cases: department head offices, technical storage, brig, xenobio, and AI satellite.
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AI cameras should not have full coverage. The AI should not be permitted to see into every single room. This makes it challenging for antagonists to accomplish their objectives in situ. It is not enough to have cameras that antagonists can disable, since an AI will notice that the camera is out, when it is not usually. Areas appropriate for lacking cameras include Operating Rooms, the Therapist’s office, the Execution Chamber, and Dormitory bathrooms and shower rooms. Similarly:
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AI cameras should never be placed in maints. This is prohibited completely. It provides a disproportionately competitive advantage for sec against antagonists. Currently there is one exception to this, and that is the cameras immediately outside the solar array maintenance areas on Cyberiad. These give AI only a vague hint of what is happening nearby, and very limited visibility into events in maints.
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Weak points are expected. The station is not a battle fortress, and it is not fun for antagonists to attempt to ingress/egress deliberately impenetrable areas. For example, Permabrig areas will typically have one or two tools just out of reach for prisoners to attempt escape. There is a toolbox in the far end of the gulag island to give gulag prisoners a chance to escape. The Head of Security’s Office is bordered by outer space on two station maps. Attempting to break into and out of sensitive areas should be challenging, but not impossible.
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Occasionally place vents and scrubbers under furniture. Having all vents and scrubbers prominently visible hinders ventcrawling antagonists. It is easy for crew to forget to weld vents they cannot see.
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Ensure security/antag balance for maintenance tunnels. This includes but is not limited to: having a primary path that allows navigability from all entrances; providing ways for security to flank antagonists and coordinate ambushes at maintenance entrances; ensuring that the majority of the primary corridors are 2 tiles wide to allow for serpentine movement and avoiding projectiles; ensuring that dead ends are rare; and providing places for antagonists to hide using hidden walls or similarly difficult to find places.
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Allow for escape routes and antag break-in routes. Departments should be connected to maintenance through a back or side door. This lets players escape and allows antags to break in. If this is not possible, departments should have extra entry and exit points.
Functional Guidelines
Stations are malleable. Players can build, rebuild, decorate, upholster, and equip the station in many ways. Mappers should take this into account when designing areas and departments. This goes doubly so for ruins: players will always find a way to work around the restrictions and intended flow of your ruin. Attempting to enforce a “correct” way of interacting with a map without deviation is impossible.
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Rooms should have specific and clear functions. Public rooms should have a clear purpose. Large maintenance areas should appear to have had a clear purpose—an abandoned robotics department, for example, or a disused monkey-fighting ring. The
/area/station
subtypes enumerate most of what rooms are expected within a station and its departments. Even if a room is largely meant for player expansion, it should use an appropriate type and name, such as the Vacant Office. -
Do not create “perfect” departments. The stations are not ideal workplaces, not state-of-the-art, and not diligently maintained by Nanotrasen. There should always be a gap between the ideal station and how the maps are designed. Departments should not come fully featured and configured, and should require crew interaction to set up and use effectively. Examples of this include Medbay preparing Operating Rooms, Cargo arranging the office to make access to the autolathe more convenient, and Engineering reconfiguring the supermatter’s pipenet. This scarcity is also critical to crew interactions: the Kitchen should have to rely on botany to make the full range of recipes, etc.
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Provide surfaces. All jobs require managing many different objects, items, and pieces of equipment. There should be an adequate number of tables and racks available for department members to place things down and drop things off.
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Place emergency lockers at appropriate intervals. Emergency closets and fire-safety closets should be accessible to crew at regular intervals in primary hallways, or just off primary hallways in adjacent maintenance tunnels.
Ruin-Specific Guidance
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Balance the risk/reward ratio of a ruin appropriately. If a player decides that the risk of running a ruin is not worth the reward, they will stop running it.
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Not all ruins should provide rare loot. “Low-reward” ruins should exist to balance out random generation, so that every ruin in a round is not a loot resource. These ruins can be purely decorative, provide a place for role-play, or provide diegetic/environmental storytelling.
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Ruins should fit the setting, and have a well signposted purpose. If, for example, your ruin is some kind of abandoned technical/research facility, it should should have appropriately defined areas: an obvious entrance, a working area for staff and crew, a testing lab, containment area for living specimens, some way for staff to have food, restrooms, and living quarters/showers if they are intended to stay on the facility for extended periods of time.
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Avoid ‘magic’ power whenever possible. While infinitely regenerating APCs and SMES units exist, they should be used sparingly. Ruins should be as realistic as possible and afford players the ability to take advantage of being powered or unpowered to navigate or exploit the ruin when possible.
Shuttle-Specific Guidance
- Shuttles should have clearly defined secure areas and bridges. Secure areas are for security and prisoner seating. Bridges are for all Command and dignitaries, and include the emergency shuttle console. Consideration should be given for hijackers and accessibility to the emergency shuttle console, as well as the ability of crew to storm the bridge if necessary to prevent a hijack.