supermarket cart

So instead of cutting down the trees in my backyard to supply me with paper for all my revisions, I decided to just go digital. It definitely made things easier to tweak and play around with to get a coastline I was happy with. It was kind of a double edged sword because I noodled around with it for so long, and the app I used really let me get lost in sub-pixel-change game for way long than I ever should of. Anyway, I really wanted a version of this map to be the version. A objective, absolute view of the map without any flair or style that I could reference when copying it for another purpose or whatever. To do this I decided just to copy the style of actual maps; or what I would eventually settle on, Google Maps.

West coast to East coast measures roughly 620kms


I decided to use Google maps to create this map not just because I like the colour scheme, but because I could at the same time steal information directly from Google Maps. I searched around looking for treelines and landmarks I liked, and ones that already fit the design I settled on previously. A little part of me feels like I cheated. Just a tiny bit of me knows that I didn't come up with every nook and cranny of this island which kind of bums me out. Hopefully I find some vindication when I use it for a D&D game and get more detailed with whatever parts my players explore. I don't ever actually plan to use this map to show my players. Like I mentioned above, I only want this one as a reference to create other more stylised maps in the future.

This process is also a testament to the iPad I'm using along with Affinity Designer. I didn't expect to go this far with this map at such a resolution (over 5000 x 5000) and haven't had any crashes, or even slow-downs pushing points around. I don't know if just a few colours with points is taxing for a computer, but there are hundreds of objects with thousands upon thousands of points that created the main island. Hopefully it doesn't start giving me issues but I am saving often with multiple copies, so if it doesn't work out I can just move over to an actual desktop.

My friend also mentioned it looks like a fish, which I wish I could unsee. Hopefully when I finish plotting in rivers, lakes, mountains ranges, etc, it wont look so fish-like