ChristosLegacy's First Map

[ChristosLegacy]

Hey my name is Christos and I want to create a fun game on my free time.
The map below is the first piece of the game I created. I would like to have a map that kinda represents my world. Nothing very accurate.
Now to the point is that a good looking map? I may change the maps colors to something more good looking, since that is just a fast gradient.
Do the mountains and rivers look natural.
The big black hole on the top-right side will be like a whole to the abyssus.
The Dark Green color at the right is a giant swamp.
The scale is 1:1,000,000 That mean every mm on the map is a km. Or every inch on the map represents 1,000,000 inch ~ 15.8 miles
The whole map is 105 * 105 miles.

Games World Atlas.png
Need feedback. Please let me know what you think.

One last thing. I created this map following the tutorial from the YouTuber and Cartographer's guild member Kindari. Here's the links:

Ascension's original tutorial: https://www.cartographersguild.com/c...e-in-Photoshop
Kindari's tutorial version: https://www.cartographersguild.com/s...ad.php?t=18643

[mewo2]

Very good first map! I really like the colours - that light blue ocean is a really refreshing change, and the vegetation feels just right - not too pale, not too saturated. I have a few comments on things you might want to think about for the next version.

I don't think you have enough visual contrast on your mountains and rivers. I'm having trouble picking out where the mountains are supposed to be - this might be "realistic" for a satellite image, but a map is supposed to show me where things are! I think the rivers are a bit thin as well - I have to zoom right in before I can see them at all.

Also, the shading on your continental shelf looks "backwards" to me. Usually, when we do hill shading, we have the light coming from the top left (or maybe top right). Your map has the light coming from the bottom right, which makes everything look "inside-out" - your ocean floor looks like it's coming out of the page, not going in.

The continents are a little bit rectangular looking, which isn't super realistic. I think blocky continents can work (Middle Earth and Westeros are both very blocky), but that they clash a bit with the more photorealistic style that you're going for here. You might want to try a more varied shape. Don't be afraid of having large empty areas of sea!

I'm not sure the scale you mention makes a lot of sense. The area you talk about (100 miles x 100 miles) is about the size of Sicily, but you have a climate varying from a snowy north, through swamps to deserts. Unless the climate of your world works very differently to Earth, I think you maybe want to increase the scale by a factor of about 10 (at least).

Looking forward to seeing where you take this!

[Mapsburgh]

For a first effort, this is looking pretty good.

A few thoughts:
- Your rivers are really faint and hard to see. I would make them much thicker and darker, and perhaps add some shadow along them so that they look like they're forming valleys.
- The relief texture is also pretty subtle, so you have to look carefully to see which areas are mountains.
- Your continental shelf seems to be the exact same distance from the shore everywhere on the map. That would be pretty unrealistic in the real world. You would expect some areas with a wide shelf, and others with practically no shelf. Also, I think having the continental shelf effect in the lakes looks weird. Lake bottoms don't usually do that shallow edge then sudden drop kind of thing.

Good luck!

[ChristosLegacy]

Give me 1hour or to update the map.

[ChristosLegacy]

Games World Atlas.png

There the updated version thanks to Mapsburgh and mewo2 for the feedback.

mowo2 fixing the entire map now gonna be a pain in the ass. So, I will see what I will do about that. Probably, keep that the same and create a different map.