Matrix Games

Balancing exploration, danger, and discovery on sprawling maps

When we talk about campaign map design in Stormbinders, it’s very easy to jump straight into terrain layouts, enemy placement, or balance numbers, but in reality none of that matters if you don’t first understand why those maps should feel good to play.

So before we talk about design rules, we always go back to something much more basic – what actually made old strategy campaigns feel cool in the first place.

While we talk about maps and exploration, here’s a short clip to immerse you in the game’s atmosphere. Turn up the volume and enjoy your reading:

Going Back to What Made Campaigns Work

As players, we grew up with strategy games where exploration wasn’t safe and maps didn’t rush you forward. You moved because you were curious, not because a quest marker told you where to go next, and every step into the fog of war felt like a small gamble.

That mix of curiosity, tension, and slow progress created a very specific game feeling, and that feeling is the foundation of how we design our campaigns today.

If exploration doesn’t feel risky, the map loses its character.

Exploration Is a Choice, Not a Habit

On our campaign maps, exploration is never treated as something you just do automatically.

Large maps, limited information, and unclear enemy strength are all there to make you stop and think before moving forward. Going off the main route might reward you with something powerful, but it can just as easily slow you down, drain your resources, or force you into a fight you weren’t ready for.

That tension is intentional. Exploration should feel exciting because it’s uncertain, not because it’s guaranteed to pay off.

Danger Needs to Be Understandable

We don’t believe in random danger.

Strong enemies protect important locations, hostile areas look hostile, and the further you move from safety, the more pressure the map applies. The goal isn’t to trick the player, but to tempt them with situations that clearly look risky and let them decide whether to push forward anyway.

When things go wrong, it should feel like the result of a bold or greedy decision, not bad luck.

Discovery That Actually Matters

Not everything on the map is meant to be found in a single playthrough, and that’s by design.

Some paths are optional, some areas are easy to miss, and some discoveries only start to matter much later in the campaign. We don’t want exploration to feel like ticking boxes – we want it to feel personal, where different players naturally uncover different parts of the map depending on how they play.

Discovery should shape your campaign, not just reward your curiosity.

From Feeling to Layout

Every campaign map starts with a simple question: how should this map feel to explore?

Only after that do we start shaping terrain, placing enemies, and deciding where points of interest belong. The layout exists to support pacing, tension, and moments of relief, not the other way around.

If a map feels safe, predictable, or comfortable from the very beginning, it usually means we’ve failed somewhere along the way.

Extra
If you’re wondering how this looks from our perspective (most of the time), take a look:

Maps sized 128×128 are so massive that it takes around five full working days just to design, script, and set everything up,
Each of the biggest map is guarantee over 12 hours of gameplay (assuming you know exactly what you’re doing) to actually finish them.

In the end, that’s 16,384 unique tiles that need to be filled with assets. Even if it’s just a tree, someone still has to click:
“Yep, a tree goes here, bones there and so on”

Stay tuned and don’t forget to wishlist Stormbinders here.