Art History: World Map

Back when we were first proof-of-concepting the idea of a world map, this was really exciting:

Look at that sexy Adobe Flash Player 11 bar up there. Did you know we started this thing in Flash?

It meant that we could use images for trees and mountains to create forests and mountain ranges with foothills, with a village or two dotting the landscape. Nate could generate these, so that no two maps would be the same. You can see some semi-random tinting going on up there too, which adds variation on a bigger level and keeps the whole thing from looking too samey and busy.

It still looks pretty busy though, even given how sparse that particular map is. Let's tone down the outlines and give things a little more fill.

Feels better already. We're missing something important though—a background texture.

A papery texture for our ground seemed like a good place to start. Now we had these big lovely maps that generate mountain ranges, forests, and sites (villages, ruins, dungeons, etc). Next came concepting for the layout of the interface...

(Mystic Manguy: an Everyman for the modern day.)

Things of note here:

• A texture that sits over the parts of the map that are still unsettled and/or unexplored
• Sites being under your control or still full of monsters
• Clickable "banners" at sites that represent the various jobs and quests that are there
• Little portraits of the heroes on the map
• Gray squares over on the side that represent your hero roster
• Friendly ol' Mystic Manguy and his action bar, full of the things he can do (we specifically wanted to mirror the action bar that appears in combat)

Sounds pretty solid. Let's give it a real art pass:

(Barlox Spidermusk was an honest-to-god name that was generated by the game for one of my heroes.)

And the map looked like this for quite a while (or, you know, kinda like this. Mockups never quite look like what eventually ends up in-game). But as the art evolved for the in-mission environments and the user interface, we realized that we wanted to really push the "made out of cut paper" look and downplay the "drawn with ink on parchment" look. So some Photoshop files called "mapRevisit" started happening, and we gave the cut paper look a shot, trying to decide whether we wanted the map to look lighter or darker:

Where we ended up was a more colorful, more verdant (if you will) version that sat between the light and middle maps. Adding papery textures of course:

Exciting!

Because we're still in the process of building out the campaign, things will almost certainly be added to or taken away from the World Map. But we've got a decent, pleasant vision that we're using as a goal for the visuals.