hello, fellow [people who perhaps spend too much time on incidental details but that's what makes life rewarding so 'vive la difference']

i've been noodling around with this sort of thing for ages, am a massive geek with a varied academic background, and am finally drawing a line in the sand with my latest bit of worldbuilding. i've scoured the interwebs and have discovered that this is a surprisingly good source of both insight and credible feedback when it comes to mapmaking, so i've arrived at your doorstep like a clown-for-hire expecting a friendly children's birthday and hoping he hasn't gotten the address wrong.

my current project is an RPG videogame, lovingly pixelated and nostalgic in appearance, whilst sadistically robbing players of a representative overworld, forcing them explore a continuous true-to-scale environment more reminiscent of World of Warcraft. i'm starting the game with a reasonably-sized world — a single island — pursuing an effort to 'do-more-with-less'.

to this end, i am spending far too much time on incidental details, from geology to wind/precipitation patterns, to projected effects of cultural/political shifts on naming and land use. worst of all, i've discovered that the 'mother map' i have on my wall — designed with real-world resolution in mind — is perhaps an order of magnitude too large for what i can use in the game.

i need to take a true-to-scale map-in-development and find a minifig-scale (lego enthusiasts will understand) scaled-down version that i can render in pixels and not leave my players in frustration or existential panic.

help me, cartographers - you're my only hope.