Anyone else recently start up Persona 5 again, and, the first morning where you’re going through the map, you’re lost switching trains?
That was a deliberate design decision from the developers. Most mornings after that you’re taken to school immediately, and then quickly after given access to fast travel.
But why did they do that? There are a few reasons. The most major being a way of moving the narrative forward. You meet friends, and are sucked into an alternate dimension on the way to school, and it would have been less interesting to just skip past some of the wonder of being lost in a new place.
The design of the school in my game, similarly, seem to be needlessly large and confusing. This is a perfectly valid critique, as the place is indeed large, and its twisting halls and rooms are a labyrinth until you learn your way around.
It was intentional that the castle was large. It was not, however, intentional that the place be confusing or hard to navigate.
I had a few points of inspiration for this. If anyone else has played Violated Heroine (a major source of inspiration for my game), there are similarities between my castle and the Capital City. Violated Heroine’s sprawling labyrinth of halls and towers, buildings and shops creates a wonderful world to explore.
Because of this, it feels more like a real city than many of the games out there. Playing Monster Girl Quest: Paradox, they have some great map design… But it’s a little bland. It’s hard to get lost in the castle town of San Illia, for example, and that sort of reduces it to a blip on the map.
At the same time, I can see several issues in my own game, especially at the start. When confined to a single castle, the sprawling design I used created bottlenecks. The stairs were only in one place, and even after expanding it there was still too much linearity.
I loved the design of the castle, but I quickly agreed that… It was a pain to navigate. That’s something that needs to be fixed.
I don’t think this is because the maps were too large though, at least not directly. It’s because, in most situations, there’s only really one path to go through the castle to get where you are going, and this really sucks.
At the same time, breaking down walls everywhere would make the place look, for lack of a better term… Holey. Like it was made of swiss cheese.
So, as you might be able to see in the latest bugfix update… One of the ways I wanted to try addressing this is through the addition of Secret Passageways!
These passages are hidden behind nearly anything, from a pile of boxes in the corner to the statues or even blank walls. Although not implemented yet, they will be marked on your map under a new “Secrets” option, and have a short tutorial to introduce it early on.
It’s a solution used in another great castle magic school, one that I think was deliberately planned. It not only sounds cool, but it also works surprisingly well as well, and while I’m certain it won’t perfectly fix the issues the game has, I think it’s a step in the right direction in reducing linearity and rewarding those who learn the school well with interesting secrets!
HMA: Dark Tower Devlog 
Well, it indeed is a pain to navigate. 🙂
Not to be taken as a wishlist or the like, but I do have some thoughts on game design that I want to share.
First, about the architecture. Not game architecture, the usual one. If you would look on floor design for various buildings – usually one can describe them as a tree-like structure.
Where root of the tree is a building facade, leaf nodes are rooms and everything that is pass-thru are corridors. And corridors are usually as straight as possible, and logically separate the rooms used for similar purpose into wings. Here is an exaggerated example of this design (it doesn’t show building facade tho): https://sites.rowan.edu/housing/_images/Floor%20Plans/triad-3.jpg
Another one: https://www.ohio.edu/housing/rs/halls/LINC/floor_plans/LINC2.gif
Of course, IRL, buildings can’t be only described by a tree-like structure. There are things like many entrances, fire exits etc. But this way of thinking may prove helpful in designing a building in a game.
Of course, real buildings are designed to be as accessible (traversable) as possible. And, as you already noted, as “linear” as possible. Because, you know, people have their reasons for being in the building (some goals), and it’s better not to interfere with them by building some maze-like corridors.
More so, IRL your magic academy would probably be divided into 3 buildings: the academy itself, dorms and building for everything other like cafeteria.
And now, about the game itself. There are many ways of describing what a game is, but I especially like that one: the game can be seen as a menu. Where menu items are the actual game content (or actions that display that content to a player). Everything other, like maps, open world etc. are just a means of selecting items in that menu. I call them “in-betweens”. It’s not that they are not important, they span over almost all of the game, but what is in them depends solely on your audience. When you would be able to answer with certainty what your core audience is, and what they want (intend) to experience in your game – then your design would flow naturally and without any second thoughts. Say, if your game is for people who want to experience sex scenes with all what the world can provide – there is no reason to keep them inside the academy. If your game is for people who want to experience the pleasures of becoming a mage – there is no reason to keep them traversing the corridors – it’s better to provide more relevant content.
Same logic could be applied backwards – who would enjoy such in-betweens? What kind of people\personalities are fit for that?
Hope that something of it would be helpful.
Cheers.
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