November 2007 Entry: Superstition Valley

[Gamerprinter]

Good thing I tried this experiment of testing the mountain modules to see how they worked. I can already tell, I need at least a dozen more pieces to cover some angles I hadn't thought of ahead of time - still it is already working well enough. I'm definitely on the right track.

Oh, I tried my scrubland fill at different scales just to see how it looked for a region fill. I tried my cactus and bushes, but they didn't work well - needs some tweaking.

Anyway, Mountain Mods - 1st attempt... WIP so far...

Top left is a flattop ridge using my first mountain doodle.
Center top, same doodle, but both sides facing each other to form a canyon and a box canyon connecting piece at the bottom.
Top right, just one side of the mountain range to indicate a plateau over the ground level.

Upper center - is one side of the "east west" canyon side with a couple of end pieces attached.
Lower center is upper and lower canyon wall with left side box canyon connector.
Bottom is just the lower wall of the canyon with two upper end mountain pieces attached.

[RPMiller]

That is really cool. I like the modularity of those. Really great idea.

[Gamerprinter]

The more I think about it, the more I can see that there is lots of potential in this "modular mountains" concept.

My map is in a 3/4 view, however, "modular mountains" should work no problem in standard birds-eye-view of a normal map perspective.

My map currently is b/w which makes it easier to match terrains, even in color as long as mountain tops maintain the same color and the area between objects also become filled with this same color or other mountain modules of the same set - it should work fine.

My "mountains" are the flat-top desert mesaland kind of mountains of the southwest US, but this should work fine with standard "alpine mountains" or any other type of mountain terrain.

Lastly, mine are hand drawings, but as long as terrain edges are similar, it should work with standard mountains created by any means digital or otherwise.

The idea came to me, only after drawing that first mountain range in my first post. I didn't want to draw a million different possible mountain ranges to offer a basic few as web objects. How could I take advantage of this single mountain range? That's when I thought to cut it down the ridge line and make two pieces.

Why not cut the ends of as well to offer different ends, add-ons or changes in terrain direction.

This could probably work with other terrains as well - forests, swamps and other terrains with defineable changes to more neutral terrains.

Thoughts?

(Still doodling for primary towns and structures, if I don't post tonight, I'll do it sometime tomorrow... )

[RobA]

How could I take advantage of this single mountain range? That's when I thought to cut it down the ridge line and make two pieces.

Why not cut the ends of as well to offer different ends, add-ons or changes in terrain direction.

This could probably work with other terrains as well - forests, swamps and other

That is how many isometric view video games do it.

-Rob A>

[Gamerprinter]

That is how many isometric view video games do it.

-Rob A>

Well that makes sense! I'm glad I'm not the only one who thought of it. There's probably lots of video game creation technique that directly applies to map making.

I should learn more - never really been a video/computer game fanatic, so I never really looked.

[ravells]

Is it possible to rotate the modular mountain elements and still have them work at differing angles?

[Gamerprinter]

Is it possible to rotate the modular mountain elements and still have them work at differing angles?

Of course these mountains could be flipped on the X-axis, and I'll probably being doing just that opposed to creating custom mountains in every direction.

However, because of the upward angles of the slopes, too much rotation would be to obviously wrong, so I don't think you have lots of rotation to work with.

I will be creating mountains in 45 degree angle, 135 degrees and their flipped opposites. I plan to create some rounded south, west, east and north faces and some faces with contorted rocks changing direction suddenly.

Although the modular mountains are proving to work well, there is only a slight amount of reuse value in each mountain module object. By mixing the pieces however, you could the same element more than once, as it is disguised by the other attached pieces.

[Gamerprinter]

Without adding more mountain modules yet, I took the existing ones I had, applied some horizontal flipping and rescaling to create a few more mountain configurations.

And I discovered they don't really work well with much rotation at all.

Anyway, a few more mountain configurations...

(I'll get to buildings later on today...)

WIP so far - mountain mods - attempt 2:

[ravells]

This is really so cool. You can't see the joins. Keep working on this GP, this is probably something you will be able to sell for real money!

[RPMiller]

Regarding matching colors and such - Don't discount translucence. If you keep them black lines on white and then make the white transparent, people can drop the symbol onto any background and have different mountain colors and such.