Re: A quick question about map spacing
I think a way to think of it might be something like: how long should the player be able to walk without hearing anything but their footsteps and watermarked ambience?
It seems like 0.25-0.35s is a fairly standard time for footsteps, given the "run don't walk" trope. I kinda feel like going more than 10-16 steps without anything else changing is probably pushing it. So 2-5 seconds of nothingness, I guess?
However, I'm thinking about the vast empty spaces in games like The Gate, Bokurano Daibouken 2, and certain areas in Swamp (north of the Kai Mart, and to a much lesser extent, the quieter stretches of longer roads). Swamp in particular would be cumbersome to make more audibly dense, if we need no more than 16 tiles of silence between ambs (and the area I mentioned did get this treatment eventually). There needs to be a point where the layout of the map accounts for the variation.
The catch is that there needs to be some variation. It doesn't have to be a new beacon every 5s. It could be a change in terrain, or a turn in the path, or maybe an empty chest or a log or something. Furthermore, just so to be a bit clearer, I'm talking about the time between hearing new things. If your landmark can be heard from 20 units away, it becomes reasonable to put the next one around 50 units away, since the silent gap is only 10 units.
But really, it depends on the nature of the map, and how the player experiences it.
For example: are there things like enemies or other NPCs running around? Do you have a lengthy path that the player needs to travel repeatedly? Basically, how likely is the player to get bored between points of interest? While that will vary between individuals, I'd probably say that a good rule of thumb is that, if the player can slow down, it doesn't matter, but if they can't speed up, 10s between points of interest is probably close to the maximum before low attention span players start to get bored.
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