When designing a new location, be it a town, country, or even a continent, putting together a map can be necessary to keep track of the landmarks, routes, buildings and more. Depending on the complexity of the region it can be a simple or difficult endeavour. What's your take on the process-do you find it easy to design maps for environments or is it difficult for you? What are your reasons? Do you have any examples of map designs that you've completed, or have you never tried to make one? If you're proficient, do you have any tips for others to keep in mind to make the process simpler?
I am terrible at creating maps, I can think of what environment I want but I can never place building or borders on the maps. Even during DND I am very simple on my maps and am just like "there is a beach and a little beach shopping front, thats it"
I made a map for a non-canon Pokémon region I used in part of a fanfic once, but I never got too detailed or concrete with it. It was pretty much "it's on a bulge-shaped peninsula with lots of coast because it was historically a prosperous trading port region, the center is mostly a dry desert, we've got a savanah over here and a jungle over there with a dried river canyon in between. Here are a bunch of cities and where they're probably located, idunevencare." My process is like this: arbitrarily choose a shape for a landmass and choose a vague biome. Expand upon that biome to similar biomes, like how Skyrim isn't only snowy mountains, but also has marshes, confierous forests, tundra, river valley canyons, etc. Place some cities in places where they seem to make sense, then find what kind of economy would make sense in that place and what culture would arise from that economy; like is it extremely wealthy because of precious metal availability, and did that wealth make people corrupt or prosperous; or is in a pretty barren place that can't sustain a large population so people are isolated from mainstream society, so they've developed their own cult/culture. I prefer not to rip directly from real regions like mainstream Pokémon does, but I do admit I sometimes try to base the finer details of fictional places off of real places, like Virbank City I decided to make similar to a 1960s or 70s representation of Baltimore I saw in a movie at one time, or Solaceon Town I based off a little city (or big town?) I visited that had some really nice quaintness and just as many churches as local residents (9 AM on a weekday and every bell starts ringing and there's no parking anywhere). It's a cop-out, but it's helpful.
I am interested in Pokémon game maps. Here's a fan game map from a game I used to play! I'm slowly learning tiling to create the design and then hope to learn enough about code to actually use it somewhere.
I'm okay at map creation. Generally, I make my maps by using points of interest, towns and huge land masses. I then compile them all together using the route that the characters will take. I am dissatisfied with the approach. It leaves a lot to be desired in terms of detail and I often have a hard time filling in the gaps in between the points of interest with any meaningful details.
I had one art teacher who was really good at hitting all of the difficult subjects. Our first project involved drawing hands, and there were two separate projects later that had to do with maps. I still find it easier just to scribble randomly and use the random shapes to decide how to make things. If you're familiar with RWBY, the creator made the world map based on smears on a napkin. I've also tried splicing together other maps and using random generators I've found online.
I grabbed Greece and traced the borders, then inverted it to create the basic map. Some transforming later and I had something that I liked. My writing partner made the entire map, and it looks pretty well. The hardest part of map making is that it shouldn’t look too dense or too emtpty. And finding the balance is difficult.
