Monday, January 5, 2015

City State of the Invincible Empress Jool-ee


At the risk of testing anyone's patience, this is the FINAL test map before knuckling down and writing the tutorial. The above is an "artistic" player's map without any hex grids, but only using the terrain and icons of the free version of Hexographer. I suck at names (obviously) so partly for that reason but also partly for the fun of it, five places are named after family members. (Guess which ones. Hint: No, my children are not named "Skull" and "Gore".) But I did try to get a bit more evocative and less generic.

I actually like this look for display purposes, though the referee would have a secret color map with more precise detail. You create this by editing and sort of tracing over the previous map. The problem with the mountain and tree icons that I used is that they are "special" icons as far as Hexographer is concerned and thus more difficult to manipulate. Also, the selection is not so great. There are "dune" icons and "rough" icons but nothing precisely desert-ish. And there isn't anything that really works for jungle or swamp. But I think that's okay. Labeling can be good enough.

I know there are better cartographic resources out there in terms of the final look. But this fits with my speed.

4 comments:

  1. Empress Julie? Doesn't quite have the "epic" ring I was expecting...

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  2. It does in my household, believe me. :)

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  3. Did I just guess your wife's name? :-)

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  4. I was going to message you on G+, but I couldn't figure out how for the life of me how to either leave a general comment on your page or message you directly through G+.

    In either case, I'd thought I'd let you know that I just binge-read the entire contents of this blog from the first post to the last. I leave this here simply because it felt inappropriate to do so on the 9/11 post.

    I appreciate your work and hope you might one day pick it back up again.

    All the best,

    Jackson

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