Originally Posted by
waldronate
It depends entirely on what you mean by "Mapping Software Development". Yes there is work out there in lots of mapping-related fields. Whether you're doing support for existing tools or making your own, there are definitely ways to make a living.
If you're looking for GIS-type development work, it can be hard to break into the field unless you've demonstrated your capabilities. Contribute to a few open source projects as you're building your skills, contacts, and reputation. After you have some skills and contacts, then research companies and figure out where you'd like to work and apply everywhere geographically plausible! Freelance is a good if you have some contacts in the field, but it's also an excellent way to be poor if you're starting out that way as your only source of income.
If you're looking for being an artist support person (that is, someone who makes pretty pictures of not-real places), there are a few companies and tools out there that might be hiring.
Role-playing gamers and authors always seem to be looking for new maps, and some are willing to invest in tools to make their own. This market segment can be saturated at times, but there are always new entrants and others that fold or lose interest. If you want to strike out on your own and make your own mapping tools, what people making make for role-playing games have seemed to want for a long time is a way to offer a general description and have the computer do all of the ugly grunt work. The large language model crowd ("AI") is getting pretty good at this sort of thing, so if you can get a good model and a solid set of results, you might be able to steal lots of market share. However, traditional procedural generation elaboration from basic sketches is probably still a workable market for a few years yet because I haven't seen any really good map-oriented elaboration systems out there quite yet. Being able to offer the option to move a single elaborated sketch from one artistic model to another would undoubtedly be a big seller. Something that lets a user drawn on overland map by sketching a rough outline of land and lakes, then put in a few paint strokes for mountains, forests, and so on and let the computer do all of the hard work of details. The critical part, though, is that the user needs to be able to go back and revise what was elaborated (no, that river should go this way, some extra mountains here, a city there, WHY DID EVERYTHING OVER THERE SUDDENLY CHANGE YOU PIECE OF SH*T SOFTWARE) without much frustration.
As far as implementation at this point, I would recommend looking at a multi-platform solution like a game engine (Wonderdraft is built on the Godot engine, for example). A game engine has all of the basic things that you need and a reasonable framework for things like input, graphics, and art asset I/O. Art assets are historically one of the ugly parts of the mapping solution, especially in the role-playing market. Everyone wants this or that fancy style, and you need to be able to cater to a few audiences from the start and regularly add new assets as you go. You can make good money selling asset packs, but finding artists willing to generate stylistically coherent elements can be difficult and pushing those things into your software can be painfully unpleasant (it's not software development, that's for sure). You also need to make the decision whether to bundle the assets into your map save file so that it can be viewed everywhere or keep the assets on your local installation and only distribute composited images.
If you want to get into the field, you need to do something. Do anything. Let people know that you're out there and what you can do. Don't hide in a room, beavering away until you give up in frustration or apathy (lots of time for frustration and apathy after you've launched).
Was that a coherent rant? I'm not sure anymore.
Reply With Quote
