Spaceport on HIGHGATE Central

[oliverberger]

Highgate Central is the capital of Highgate, a planet controlled by the Mars Colonial Council in my Post Apocalyptic Near Earth Campaign (PANEC) and this is a very crude (in comparison to the other maps on these forums) map of the spaceport.

The spaceport itself is divided into two sections, one for civilian transports and goods and a military district which is HQ for the 5th MCC fleet, called "Gatekeeper Fleet".

Comments and criticism strongly encouraged.

highgate-central_spaceport01.png

[Ilanthar]

Looks like an interesting start. I like the 3D like bulildings and it's very clean. Not a fan of the white background with the grid right now, but I guess you're gonna do something with it.

[oliverberger]

Hej Ilanthar,

thanks for your feedback. I forgot to mention that I do maps mostly because we need them for roleplaying and as my skills aren't anywhere near that of many other forum members a clean and somewhat crude approach will have to do

Same with the grid. We need it to get the distances from A to B so my players can have an estimate about how long it will take to get there.

Any suggestions as to which color as a background would be more suitable? I can do a version with different colors and no grid, of course. Maybe this would be more pleasing to the eye, then?

Cheers!

[Ilanthar]

Maybe a Blue Print style? Or just paper/screen texture.

I hope you don't mind but I did a quick test for a blue print. It would require to redo the colours for the different areas, lane, but you get the idea.
highgate-central_spaceport test.jpg

[oliverberger]

Hej Ilanthar!

Thanks for the blueprint! I really like the optics and asked my players for feedback. 70% of them agreed it is more scifi, more technical and edgy, looks cleaner and to some extent better! So thank you very much for the input.

The others argued that all the information coded into the colors now is missing and it could be that all the maps will look similar (which I don't mind, btw).

How did you do it? Just replaced the colorscheme in PS or did you actually needed some tinkering? I'd like to apply this style to the .AI file as well but am no Illustrator Pro, unfortunately.

I am thinking about having three styles at least for my campaign. A blueprint one like you did (for players slicing into databases to get ... well blueprints ... of buildings etc), a scan version like I used here and one "tactical" map for actual playing purposes. Maybe a bit more work but in the end I hope the readers of our website will appreciate it.

[Ilanthar]

By Oliverberger
I really like the optics and asked my players for feedback. 70% of them agreed it is more scifi, more technical and edgy, looks cleaner and to some extent better! So thank you very much for the input.

Man you're doing stats?! You must have a scientific background like me for doing this

More seriously :

How did you do it? Just replaced the colorscheme in PS or did you actually needed some tinkering? I'd like to apply this style to the .AI file as well but am no Illustrator Pro, unfortunately.

I'm not using Photoshop. I used PSP7 (old software) : I change it to gray levels then reverse the luminosity then set the layer on "brightened" and simply added it on top of a blue paper texture.

The others argued that all the information coded into the colors now is missing and it could be that all the maps will look similar (which I don't mind, btw).

Those colors can be added, somehow, by adding extra-layer(s) with the colored area/labels on a multiply or color or taint effect, I suppose.