I will not be attempting any parallax mapping for this first game I'm working on. Although I love the look of parallax maps, I feel that I don't have the skills necessary to do it justice and it would greatly lengthen the timeline I've set forth for completing this game. That being said, I think it's still possible to create interesting maps (albeit, not as cool looking as parallax maps) using just the map editor provided with RM VX Ace. Whether or not mine turn out to actually be interesting is going to be more a matter of how much time I'm going to have to put into each of them, not to mention getting past my learning curve for how to actually create maps.

I have a pretty good idea of what the majority of the towns and dungeons in the game should look like. The challenge is going to be collecting or creating the tile pieces I'll need to create the looks I have in my head. I've made some rough attempts at the maps for the first few locations the players will be introduced to and an initial attempt at an airship deck map that won't come into play until much later in the game.

I was really inspired by the vacation trip I had to Costa Rica earlier this year to incorporate a lush rain forest like environment. I'm going to refer to it in game as "The Cloud Forest". Below is a screenshot of just a small section of this forest dungeon.

Here's a small desert outpost I named "Gunn City". It's not much of a city and the population is very sparse. It borders a sprawling desert/canyon area that's fairly far removed from any real inhabitable area.

Another village that sits in a valley surrounded by mountains and forest. I named this one "Bristol Village". It used to be heavily populated by humans but has recently been abandoned by most of the people who used to live there and slowly being taken over by another humanoid species I call the Legioneers.

Lastly, here's that airship I mentioned earlier. I call it "The Outlander". This is just supposed to be the deck of the ship but I think I'll eventually end up creating some interior rooms that can be explored while the party is mounted on the airship. Not sure how happy I am with the current state of this one. I tried using some pirate ship tilesets I found online but I didn't really like how it turned out so I thought I'd try just making a ship-like map from scratch. This one's probably going to go through several overhauls before I'm satisfied with it but since I don't really need to worry about using it for a while I'm not in a rush to get it sorted out just yet.

Everything is a work in progress but I've been doing a lot of map/dungeon planning and I feel like I'm making acceptable progress. I want to have a solid 2hr playable demo for my brother and sister by the time they come visit for the holidays this year. I think I can hack that so long as RL work doesn't get too ridiculous between now and November. Yikes, the year's almost over!