- May 3, 2018
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I'm posting this to hopefully be a fun discussion around both map designing, and game world designing, and not really expecting a solid answer to any particular question. Also positing this in the dev help subform since the main programming/dev area seems to be saturated with in progress game development threads.
The project: Text-based sci-fi (adventure?) game that focuses on a particular erotic roleplay I see a lot, featuring girls on a ship/space station that gets overrunned/infected by space creatures/monsters. Gameplay mainly involves sneaking around the station, treating it like its a dungeon or something because I'm inspired by games like Trap Quest and Degrees of Lewdity. While working on a simple mock up of the space station/ship, I noticed that the map is much more interesting the more "non sensible" the design is.
I don't really have much to show, I wasn't planning on making a serious presentation so I haven't made a proper collection of mock-up art, and I mostly noticed the issue when I try to look at table top maps made for other games. That, and I'm keep things as simple as possible, doing the bare minimum so that I can move fast and stay interested.
The above image is one design I am playing with that I currently like, as you can see the mock up is very simple right now, Two large nodes or rooms, 5 smaller nodes/rooms, and some corridors. Hopefully you also notice that the image is very rough, because there's a lot of empty space.
This section is an example of filling up some of that empty space, this one showing off how big some living quarters may be, and for a sense of scale the hallways/corridors are large, 7 feet wide (mainly designed so I can make art showing a hallway with several bodies strewed across the floor), with the dark hallway (maintenance area?) about half that width in-between two rooms. The red/blue pattern represents each unique "node" a character can be at (this is a text based adventure, so the world is handled in terms of points of interest). The idea is plan out big areas, then the major connecting halls, then fill the space with smaller less significant rooms, and then fill the space with imaginary maintenance shafts and ventilation ducts for characters or creatures to sneak around in. As you may also notice, I am designing the halls rather arbitrarily, adding bends and intersections where ever.
What do I mean when I say the map is more interesting the more "non sensible" it is?
First: The halls.
If I were to design a real ship or station, if it was so large that it actually needed halls to manage a flow of people, then a better design would probably something similar to how cities work (imagine the game City Skylines), where we treat roads like blood vessels.
For example, if the above is an outline for a spaceship, with the front/main-bridge at the top of the image, then the center spine of the ship can be thought of as the main highway, the main artery, that all other 'sub-halls' connect to, or at least that's my intuition. If you've ever played city skylines or ever had to work on flow optimization problems, you know there's more than one way to go about designing flow solutions. on the left side, the sub halls follow a pattern, you may even say that it looks like a leaf. If I kept adding sub halls and eventually smaller and smaller rooms/areas/halls/corridors, and if I got rid of the odd angle and made the system more grid like, the design would follow like city grid layouts, were major roads break out into streets, which allow rows of house to be placed one after another, eventually making a block pattern. The halls would be like the veins of a leaf, breaking out into smaller paths to distribute water/crew-members
Alternatively on the right side, halls can connected into a nexus point so rather than having one main hall congested with a lot of traffic. Much of the traffic (crew members walking the main hallway) is often unrelated traffic, meaning each person is moving to a unique location, with there being no common flow. IE crew member fred could be sneaking off to tiffiny's room while pilot james is running late to his shift at the helm, and has to push his way through the crowded main hall. having Nexus points allows unrelated traffic cross other un related traffic, allowing the briefest interaction between the two. The benefit of this is that halls can stop being 'general' halls for general traffic, and instead be 'specific' halls for specific traffic, and specific traffic often tends to be related traffic all often needing to go to the same area.
While the above mock up doesn't show a good example of using nexus points and grouping traffic flow by traffic type, the station idea sort of implements the concept, and a good example is something we are all familiar with, the Captains Quarter. The captain's quarter is often directly connected to the bridge, and that is because if there is an emergency, the captain can quickly go where they are needed, and even if its not an emergency, because of their job, they typically need to go back and forth between being on the bridge and being in their office, so making a dedicated connection for this is an example of designing a traffic route for a particular kind of traffic type. Similarly, the idea with the space station is the lower large node could be engineering, with the idea being to fill the empty space leading to engineering with living quarters for the engineering team, so that they are close to where they need to be, and since engineering traffic typically doesn't need to access the main monitoring/control room in the center, there is no need to directly connect engineering to the center node, even though the two are pretty close to each other physically.
The main problems with halls is the fact that I want this to be a sneaking games, with opportunities to hide and opportunities to run into surprises. A sensible hall tries to be as simple as possible, getting people to their destination with the least amount of work and hassle. The issue with this is that it tends to lead to straight hallways, as in the ship mock up. The problem with straight hallways is that for a game that wants to take advantage of sneaking game mechanics, hallways leave characters pretty exposed to anything else in the hallway, so a characters have to be careful when they decide to use hallways, there's no where to hide. If you need to get to the far end of a ship, you need to take the main corridor (if there is one), once there, that is pretty much the most exposed placed to be, as something all the way at the end of the hall may notice you. And if it does... well you can probably hide and outrun it since its so far away... meaning the problem can be escaped, but for an adult game where interacting with things is the most interesting part, I want to trigger encounters, not just force the player to run away all the time.
In the above example, I place a random Z bend. Even though the corridor is curved which limits how far something can see around the bend and notice the player/character, the game play would pretty much be limited to being spotted at a distance and trying to run away. But with each bend, not being able to see what's around the corner, several opportunities for surprise interactions become available. The simplest of which is, checking around a corner before proceeding down to the next corner. And with there being two corners, after passing the first corner, it is no longer possible to check behind yourself, so someone or something that isn't sneaking could catch up to the player, and with them spotting the character at such a short distance, it could catch the player. Example: in the middle short section, the player could be in one of the red squares checking around the corner while remaining hidden, meanwhile they won't be spotted by the security guard that's following them until that guard enters the blue corner and can see down the short hall section and spot them.
The second thing with non sensible halls is I think they are a lot more visually interesting and complex than a perfectly planned hall layout. I think the best mindset to have when making non-sensible layouts is to bullshit like you know nothing but it looks cool. What I mean by that is.... I'm an engineer, I tend to have a better technical understanding of how things work or should work. A lot of the time in games and stories, creators try to introduce something technical even though they don't have a proper technical understanding of things. So you get things like simplified hacking gameplay, or really cool gadgets that simply aren't practical to make. But the point is, 1 its still cool, and 2 its good enough. With past projects, I've agonized trying to over develop ideas, making them both practical, but still usable for non technical users (example making a more accurate hackings game mechanic or something), and after repeating this mistake several times, I've finally conceded that realism and accuracy isn't worth it since it typically goes over everyone's head, it doesn't make the experience any better, and focusing on what you want is more important. So add all the blinking lights you want! Hence this was my approach for doing these halls, and the original idea behind posting this thread. Be random first, make it cool and make sense later, or at least go through a cycle, prioritizing fun an cool over practicality.
Second: Grid based Maps
In my mock up of the station, I played with curved halls rather than straight halls, to break away from typical grid layouts, such as what table top games typically use. The main reason for this is actually the polar opposite the issue with halls. Another way to describe designing halls and its issues is to describe the "choice paralyses" problem. Choice Paralyses is a phenomenon where, when given too many options and nothing to guide you to an answer, people become unable to make a choice. A common example is the blank canvas problem in design, if you are given a blank canvas, meaning if you are allowed to make anything you want without limitation, you have infinite possibilities, but you have no idea what you want to do. Because of this, there is another concept related to the topic, "constraints equals creativity." While often some of the most creative designs in games arise due to developers having to work around some pretty serious constraints, that's not entirely what I mean. At a basic level, if you are given a blank canvas, but then you are given certain constraints or limitations on what you can do, you can use these constraints as your initial guide on planning what you want to do, and its up to do to fill the gap. Often in design, this means making decisions which act as additional constraints, so you can narrow the problem to something more specific that you can actually fill. In the case of planning hallways, by first planning out important rooms first, and then filling in the remaining space with less important rooms, I can focus on what I can solve, and leave what I can't solve yet to be solved later later. planning out hallways in terms of solving a flow problem is to limit myself to using halls when I could instead use a grid of rooms directly connected to each other, like with houses.
Basically using hallways, or the issue of planning hallways has to deal with the issue that I'm trying to solve a problem that starts too vague, and I need to give myself some constraints in order to limit my possibilities, reduce the choice paralyses effect, and eventually make something.
On the other end of the problem however is starting with a grid, and trying to plan out a space ship/station from the bottom up. The issue with this is now I'm starting too detailed, which makes it hard to abstract and see the bigger picture. The best example of this is again the problem with being an engineer and getting caught up in the details. If you can work with grids, then you are technically working with placing every individual wall. If you are work with walls, and you want to make an ship/station with secret maintenance shafts and vent ducts, then you have to consider how to fit in these features while also trying to figure out the whole ship. Basically you have to figure out everything in one shot, you're trying to do too much at one time, trying to make too many decisions at a time. I'm basically saying one needs to go back and forth between being detailed and being considerate, and needing to be general and get a basic idea down to give your self a basic outline you can use as a sort of constraint. Naturally people do this already making a basic sketch before jumping in
on a side note, regarding planning out maintenance shafts and vents, one reason I say I could add them as "imaginary" as I describe in the intro, is if I don't use a gride and just have a basic outline of rooms, I can do what Degrees of Lewdity does for its sewers, where there are access points, but I don't really have to worry about the shafts running into physical boundaries simply because they exist on another layer or plane separate from the floor plan. I however am not sure how I want to go about this as I want some maintenance shafts to be in the walls, next to walk ways, and even going under some halls with gridded floors or hatches to peak through or be seen through. This means I don't want to treat the maintenance shafts as perfectly issolated from the rest of the ship/station's floor plan, and I infact want to force players to use the halways sometimes simply because its the most exposed and dangerous part of the ship.
The second issue I have with grid based mapes is I hate them. They encourage optimal design, which in a space ship and home makes sense, but I think it looks terrible, boring.
art not by me, just randomly pulled from the internet
The main issue is that I want to make a ship/station feel large. Specifically I want to incite the feeling that the ship/station is grand , such that the idea of having travel through the ship/station be an intimidating and daunting task, sort of like trying to reach each major point in the Ishimura in the game Dead Space. The art for these ships are good, but they don't offer that intimidating vibe I'm looking for, and it mostly hast to deal with their sense of scale and space. I want to make the ship seem large and intimidating, I however, want to do this without filling the ship/station with too much detail, I don't want to fill it with a thousand rooms for a thousand families, each one being insignificant simply because there is so many. The brain simplifies information where possible, and if you have a thousand rooms to make, and have a grid based system, you are probably going to group these rooms into a grid pattern. This not only makes things not interesting, but with using a grid system, force to design efficiently, it makes the ship small, and gives viewers a sense of scale which is something I want to break and avoid.
as with my two mock ups, a station and a ship
I can fit the ship into the same space, I'll just have to fill the space between halls with lots of rooms and possibly sub halls, but at the end of the day it will feel like a ship because it looks like a ship, while with the station, even though in comparison it will probably be tiny, not even a station more like an outpost, if I can make the map look broken up like a series of connected modules rather than a perfectly planed floor plan for a house, I can give the illusion of the station being larger and than it actually, and that is partly helped by having the hallways be rather eratic like the major roads in a city that was design only after people made their own small roads. Again, this is a case of bull shitting the design because its good enough, the effect is more important than being accurate.
Some counter points to this are:
on a smaller scale, room size or so, grid based design is ok because we aren't looking at the big picture, we are focused on a room, and a grid layout keeps it clean and readable as well as practical, I think the above looks quite nice, and I may do something similar for each major node/room.
I've always liked round design simply because they look interesting, even interior camera shots look interesting simply because the curve of the design prevents viewers from seeing the full length of the hall, prevents viewers from seeing the full scope of the interior, thus every camera shot is limited to a small space and being unable to see the whole space means the mind is left to imagine the rest where we often make the illusion of how grand a ship is even if the design is as simple as the above design, much smaller then the other ships I showed off. Another thing that makes this interesting is you can see that the design is not efficient, walls are not perfectly thin and next to each other, and they have a lot of shape variation. back in the 50's we learned that round designs aren't practical for homes, square corners are easier to work with and place furniture, but its still visually interesting.
an example from some early ideas are these more detailed modular based designs, where I add in details which make the ship more visually interesting than it really is. Showing each individual bulkhead, showing that bulk heads are slotted into each module frame as if this were something being made in real life and designed for ease of manufacturing, showing where lights, warning lights, and red emergency lights would be placed, I even added structs and cables assuming the space between modules inside the ship is empty space, and whether a beam or cable is used was based on actual stress simulation of how the modules could be solidly connected at minimal cost while leaving maintenance space. However, this still has the issue that the ship even at its starting phase won't be very grand, even the one true hallway is very basic and short. Hence I just start with a larger vauge map and avoid a grid system until I want to show of individual rooms or something.
Anyways, I just wanted to share this because it was fun and interesting, though I don't know if much of this will apply to other people's projects since my needs are a bit unique.
The project: Text-based sci-fi (adventure?) game that focuses on a particular erotic roleplay I see a lot, featuring girls on a ship/space station that gets overrunned/infected by space creatures/monsters. Gameplay mainly involves sneaking around the station, treating it like its a dungeon or something because I'm inspired by games like Trap Quest and Degrees of Lewdity. While working on a simple mock up of the space station/ship, I noticed that the map is much more interesting the more "non sensible" the design is.
I don't really have much to show, I wasn't planning on making a serious presentation so I haven't made a proper collection of mock-up art, and I mostly noticed the issue when I try to look at table top maps made for other games. That, and I'm keep things as simple as possible, doing the bare minimum so that I can move fast and stay interested.
The above image is one design I am playing with that I currently like, as you can see the mock up is very simple right now, Two large nodes or rooms, 5 smaller nodes/rooms, and some corridors. Hopefully you also notice that the image is very rough, because there's a lot of empty space.
This section is an example of filling up some of that empty space, this one showing off how big some living quarters may be, and for a sense of scale the hallways/corridors are large, 7 feet wide (mainly designed so I can make art showing a hallway with several bodies strewed across the floor), with the dark hallway (maintenance area?) about half that width in-between two rooms. The red/blue pattern represents each unique "node" a character can be at (this is a text based adventure, so the world is handled in terms of points of interest). The idea is plan out big areas, then the major connecting halls, then fill the space with smaller less significant rooms, and then fill the space with imaginary maintenance shafts and ventilation ducts for characters or creatures to sneak around in. As you may also notice, I am designing the halls rather arbitrarily, adding bends and intersections where ever.
What do I mean when I say the map is more interesting the more "non sensible" it is?
First: The halls.
If I were to design a real ship or station, if it was so large that it actually needed halls to manage a flow of people, then a better design would probably something similar to how cities work (imagine the game City Skylines), where we treat roads like blood vessels.
For example, if the above is an outline for a spaceship, with the front/main-bridge at the top of the image, then the center spine of the ship can be thought of as the main highway, the main artery, that all other 'sub-halls' connect to, or at least that's my intuition. If you've ever played city skylines or ever had to work on flow optimization problems, you know there's more than one way to go about designing flow solutions. on the left side, the sub halls follow a pattern, you may even say that it looks like a leaf. If I kept adding sub halls and eventually smaller and smaller rooms/areas/halls/corridors, and if I got rid of the odd angle and made the system more grid like, the design would follow like city grid layouts, were major roads break out into streets, which allow rows of house to be placed one after another, eventually making a block pattern. The halls would be like the veins of a leaf, breaking out into smaller paths to distribute water/crew-members
Alternatively on the right side, halls can connected into a nexus point so rather than having one main hall congested with a lot of traffic. Much of the traffic (crew members walking the main hallway) is often unrelated traffic, meaning each person is moving to a unique location, with there being no common flow. IE crew member fred could be sneaking off to tiffiny's room while pilot james is running late to his shift at the helm, and has to push his way through the crowded main hall. having Nexus points allows unrelated traffic cross other un related traffic, allowing the briefest interaction between the two. The benefit of this is that halls can stop being 'general' halls for general traffic, and instead be 'specific' halls for specific traffic, and specific traffic often tends to be related traffic all often needing to go to the same area.
While the above mock up doesn't show a good example of using nexus points and grouping traffic flow by traffic type, the station idea sort of implements the concept, and a good example is something we are all familiar with, the Captains Quarter. The captain's quarter is often directly connected to the bridge, and that is because if there is an emergency, the captain can quickly go where they are needed, and even if its not an emergency, because of their job, they typically need to go back and forth between being on the bridge and being in their office, so making a dedicated connection for this is an example of designing a traffic route for a particular kind of traffic type. Similarly, the idea with the space station is the lower large node could be engineering, with the idea being to fill the empty space leading to engineering with living quarters for the engineering team, so that they are close to where they need to be, and since engineering traffic typically doesn't need to access the main monitoring/control room in the center, there is no need to directly connect engineering to the center node, even though the two are pretty close to each other physically.
The main problems with halls is the fact that I want this to be a sneaking games, with opportunities to hide and opportunities to run into surprises. A sensible hall tries to be as simple as possible, getting people to their destination with the least amount of work and hassle. The issue with this is that it tends to lead to straight hallways, as in the ship mock up. The problem with straight hallways is that for a game that wants to take advantage of sneaking game mechanics, hallways leave characters pretty exposed to anything else in the hallway, so a characters have to be careful when they decide to use hallways, there's no where to hide. If you need to get to the far end of a ship, you need to take the main corridor (if there is one), once there, that is pretty much the most exposed placed to be, as something all the way at the end of the hall may notice you. And if it does... well you can probably hide and outrun it since its so far away... meaning the problem can be escaped, but for an adult game where interacting with things is the most interesting part, I want to trigger encounters, not just force the player to run away all the time.
In the above example, I place a random Z bend. Even though the corridor is curved which limits how far something can see around the bend and notice the player/character, the game play would pretty much be limited to being spotted at a distance and trying to run away. But with each bend, not being able to see what's around the corner, several opportunities for surprise interactions become available. The simplest of which is, checking around a corner before proceeding down to the next corner. And with there being two corners, after passing the first corner, it is no longer possible to check behind yourself, so someone or something that isn't sneaking could catch up to the player, and with them spotting the character at such a short distance, it could catch the player. Example: in the middle short section, the player could be in one of the red squares checking around the corner while remaining hidden, meanwhile they won't be spotted by the security guard that's following them until that guard enters the blue corner and can see down the short hall section and spot them.
The second thing with non sensible halls is I think they are a lot more visually interesting and complex than a perfectly planned hall layout. I think the best mindset to have when making non-sensible layouts is to bullshit like you know nothing but it looks cool. What I mean by that is.... I'm an engineer, I tend to have a better technical understanding of how things work or should work. A lot of the time in games and stories, creators try to introduce something technical even though they don't have a proper technical understanding of things. So you get things like simplified hacking gameplay, or really cool gadgets that simply aren't practical to make. But the point is, 1 its still cool, and 2 its good enough. With past projects, I've agonized trying to over develop ideas, making them both practical, but still usable for non technical users (example making a more accurate hackings game mechanic or something), and after repeating this mistake several times, I've finally conceded that realism and accuracy isn't worth it since it typically goes over everyone's head, it doesn't make the experience any better, and focusing on what you want is more important. So add all the blinking lights you want! Hence this was my approach for doing these halls, and the original idea behind posting this thread. Be random first, make it cool and make sense later, or at least go through a cycle, prioritizing fun an cool over practicality.
Second: Grid based Maps
In my mock up of the station, I played with curved halls rather than straight halls, to break away from typical grid layouts, such as what table top games typically use. The main reason for this is actually the polar opposite the issue with halls. Another way to describe designing halls and its issues is to describe the "choice paralyses" problem. Choice Paralyses is a phenomenon where, when given too many options and nothing to guide you to an answer, people become unable to make a choice. A common example is the blank canvas problem in design, if you are given a blank canvas, meaning if you are allowed to make anything you want without limitation, you have infinite possibilities, but you have no idea what you want to do. Because of this, there is another concept related to the topic, "constraints equals creativity." While often some of the most creative designs in games arise due to developers having to work around some pretty serious constraints, that's not entirely what I mean. At a basic level, if you are given a blank canvas, but then you are given certain constraints or limitations on what you can do, you can use these constraints as your initial guide on planning what you want to do, and its up to do to fill the gap. Often in design, this means making decisions which act as additional constraints, so you can narrow the problem to something more specific that you can actually fill. In the case of planning hallways, by first planning out important rooms first, and then filling in the remaining space with less important rooms, I can focus on what I can solve, and leave what I can't solve yet to be solved later later. planning out hallways in terms of solving a flow problem is to limit myself to using halls when I could instead use a grid of rooms directly connected to each other, like with houses.
Basically using hallways, or the issue of planning hallways has to deal with the issue that I'm trying to solve a problem that starts too vague, and I need to give myself some constraints in order to limit my possibilities, reduce the choice paralyses effect, and eventually make something.
On the other end of the problem however is starting with a grid, and trying to plan out a space ship/station from the bottom up. The issue with this is now I'm starting too detailed, which makes it hard to abstract and see the bigger picture. The best example of this is again the problem with being an engineer and getting caught up in the details. If you can work with grids, then you are technically working with placing every individual wall. If you are work with walls, and you want to make an ship/station with secret maintenance shafts and vent ducts, then you have to consider how to fit in these features while also trying to figure out the whole ship. Basically you have to figure out everything in one shot, you're trying to do too much at one time, trying to make too many decisions at a time. I'm basically saying one needs to go back and forth between being detailed and being considerate, and needing to be general and get a basic idea down to give your self a basic outline you can use as a sort of constraint. Naturally people do this already making a basic sketch before jumping in
on a side note, regarding planning out maintenance shafts and vents, one reason I say I could add them as "imaginary" as I describe in the intro, is if I don't use a gride and just have a basic outline of rooms, I can do what Degrees of Lewdity does for its sewers, where there are access points, but I don't really have to worry about the shafts running into physical boundaries simply because they exist on another layer or plane separate from the floor plan. I however am not sure how I want to go about this as I want some maintenance shafts to be in the walls, next to walk ways, and even going under some halls with gridded floors or hatches to peak through or be seen through. This means I don't want to treat the maintenance shafts as perfectly issolated from the rest of the ship/station's floor plan, and I infact want to force players to use the halways sometimes simply because its the most exposed and dangerous part of the ship.
The second issue I have with grid based mapes is I hate them. They encourage optimal design, which in a space ship and home makes sense, but I think it looks terrible, boring.
art not by me, just randomly pulled from the internet
The main issue is that I want to make a ship/station feel large. Specifically I want to incite the feeling that the ship/station is grand , such that the idea of having travel through the ship/station be an intimidating and daunting task, sort of like trying to reach each major point in the Ishimura in the game Dead Space. The art for these ships are good, but they don't offer that intimidating vibe I'm looking for, and it mostly hast to deal with their sense of scale and space. I want to make the ship seem large and intimidating, I however, want to do this without filling the ship/station with too much detail, I don't want to fill it with a thousand rooms for a thousand families, each one being insignificant simply because there is so many. The brain simplifies information where possible, and if you have a thousand rooms to make, and have a grid based system, you are probably going to group these rooms into a grid pattern. This not only makes things not interesting, but with using a grid system, force to design efficiently, it makes the ship small, and gives viewers a sense of scale which is something I want to break and avoid.
as with my two mock ups, a station and a ship
I can fit the ship into the same space, I'll just have to fill the space between halls with lots of rooms and possibly sub halls, but at the end of the day it will feel like a ship because it looks like a ship, while with the station, even though in comparison it will probably be tiny, not even a station more like an outpost, if I can make the map look broken up like a series of connected modules rather than a perfectly planed floor plan for a house, I can give the illusion of the station being larger and than it actually, and that is partly helped by having the hallways be rather eratic like the major roads in a city that was design only after people made their own small roads. Again, this is a case of bull shitting the design because its good enough, the effect is more important than being accurate.
Some counter points to this are:
on a smaller scale, room size or so, grid based design is ok because we aren't looking at the big picture, we are focused on a room, and a grid layout keeps it clean and readable as well as practical, I think the above looks quite nice, and I may do something similar for each major node/room.
I've always liked round design simply because they look interesting, even interior camera shots look interesting simply because the curve of the design prevents viewers from seeing the full length of the hall, prevents viewers from seeing the full scope of the interior, thus every camera shot is limited to a small space and being unable to see the whole space means the mind is left to imagine the rest where we often make the illusion of how grand a ship is even if the design is as simple as the above design, much smaller then the other ships I showed off. Another thing that makes this interesting is you can see that the design is not efficient, walls are not perfectly thin and next to each other, and they have a lot of shape variation. back in the 50's we learned that round designs aren't practical for homes, square corners are easier to work with and place furniture, but its still visually interesting.
an example from some early ideas are these more detailed modular based designs, where I add in details which make the ship more visually interesting than it really is. Showing each individual bulkhead, showing that bulk heads are slotted into each module frame as if this were something being made in real life and designed for ease of manufacturing, showing where lights, warning lights, and red emergency lights would be placed, I even added structs and cables assuming the space between modules inside the ship is empty space, and whether a beam or cable is used was based on actual stress simulation of how the modules could be solidly connected at minimal cost while leaving maintenance space. However, this still has the issue that the ship even at its starting phase won't be very grand, even the one true hallway is very basic and short. Hence I just start with a larger vauge map and avoid a grid system until I want to show of individual rooms or something.
Anyways, I just wanted to share this because it was fun and interesting, though I don't know if much of this will apply to other people's projects since my needs are a bit unique.
