@beardalaxy It might be due to simplicity. Even the Harvest Moon games which take place in a modern-ish setting have the bedroom at the front door. I actually thought that it was actually a Japanese thing to do in real life. The only JRPG series I know of that designs houses realistically is the Mother/Earthbound series and Pokemon.

As for your game, you could just have doors that are nothing but decoration and really just lead to nowhere. Is there any point in including a NPCs bedroom unless it plays a significant part of the game?

@Alex @beardalaxy Just only show the necessary rooms and add doors that lead to nowhere as decorations.

@xianc78 @Alex i want as much of the game world to be explorable as possible, but in an easy way for the player that doesn't get too annoying. i also wanted to make the NPCs feel relatively "alive" with their schedules and such, so tucking them between a bunch of loading zones would mean that the player wouldn't be able to see that as easily. if i wanted to add separate rooms in houses blocked by doors that you have to go through, i would also not exactly want to add every single room to every single house because that would take far too long, but seeing a door that can't be opened in a game that is an open-world adventure is always pretty sad. so i settled on making a bunch of house layouts that had the entire house in one easily accessible map for each region, then filled those houses with things that i thought the NPCs would realistically have in their homes. there is often some environmental story telling if you look close enough ;)

there is also a character who can pick simple locks if you have her in your party, so i have tried to adhere to that as close as possible. doors and chests that normally require standard keys can be picked by her, and yeah that means you can go inside people's houses if they're locked up (though it takes away from your karma). so it creates another issue where, if there is a door that is just there for decoration, i can't just say it is locked or say nothing at all because the player comes to expect that they can go through every door, even if it is locked. there are a few notable times where i do have to do this unfortunately, when there is literally NOTHING to be gained from going behind the door. like i said, there are going to be plenty of NPCs who are in different rooms at different times and such, but there are some houses that just have literally nothing and nobody in them so you do have to kind of cut things out in some places, just to make the experience ultimately better for the player as well as yourself as the dev trying to make everything.

most pokemon houses are completely unrealistic too, without beds or bathrooms. the MC house only has one bed and no bed for their mom lol.

mother does a decent job at its house building because it is meaning to really sell the modern, american aesthetic. even in earthbound though, there is not even a room for ness's mom.

i've at least tried to make sure that everything necessary to accommodate the NPCs is there, even if the designs of the houses themselves are fairly simple and not quite "realistic" :)

on the topic of towns only having 5 buildings or whatever, this is also true to my game! the towns are on a very, very small scale. the game takes place during a plague, where a lot of the population has died, so i didn't want to have these massive cities with absolutely nobody and nothing in them. there is a little bit of that, but just enough to sell the idea. when envisioning towns for the D&D campaign that i run, they are much more sprawling and the bigger cities even take hours to traverse on foot.

@beardalaxy @Alex
>but seeing a door that can't be opened in a game that is an open-world adventure is always pretty sad

Fallout has unpickable locks. There are even buildings you can't enter. Though it is justified in-universe because they are boarded off as people thought that would protect them from a nuclear blast.

>most pokemon houses are completely unrealistic too, without beds or bathrooms. the MC house only has one bed and no bed for their mom lol.

I forgot about that. I only thought of Pokemon because your bedroom is on the second floor of the house.

>the game takes place during a plague, where a lot of the population has died, so i didn't want to have these massive cities with absolutely nobody and nothing in them.

A city with a lot of abandoned buildings would make sense in a depopulated world. Though I think you could justify the lack of buildings by saying that they burned the houses of the dead in hopes to stop the spread of the disease. You could also have abandoned buildings where you can loot. You can even leave diaries and letters in the buildings for the sake of world building.

@xianc78 @Alex some of this is just either beyond the scope of a one man project or things I would have to go back to change and at this point it just isn't feasible to do that unless I want to be here forever (dwarf fortress has been in dev since 2002 and for most of that time it's been a 2-man team). I do actually have diaries and stuff for lore building though! And again, a problem with making too many empty buildings or even just too many buildings in general is that it quickly becomes overwhelming for players with how large maps become. Even in massive open world games, unless it just takes place in a single city like GTA for instance, the towns are relatively small and everything is on a smaller scale. I think Skyrim's scale is something like 1:20000. Better to have smaller, denser experiences otherwise you get something like Daggerfall (larger than Great Britain) which is incredibly daunting. I mean, I have an overworld where you can travel 4 hours by taking one step. There's only so much one developer can do, and there's only so much a player can hold down a button while nothing/very little happens. Or you make some sort of algorithm to generate encounters, but that also gets boring after a while and would be a lot of work for me to add. You need a lot of interesting systems to make travel fun. Not to mention it's just literally not in the style of the game I'm trying to make.

Tl;dr
A) too much work for 1 dev
B) too much time I'd have to spend remaking things, getting stuck in development hell
C) too overwhelming and vast for a typical player while not having enough well-built systems to justify the scope
D) not the genre I'm exactly gunning for, the idea is a game that is like an old JRPG but with more freedom, not a full western rpg

@xianc78 @Alex mm! Also, the plague is plant-based. It kills plants, which means the animals thin out too and thus the continent begins to starve. So the dead aren't sick or anything, they just die of starvation. I'd imagine their houses would either be untouched, ransacked, or seized by the government depending on where they live.