First land of Ascala

[Hyptosis]

I'm working on a game, and have to make some maps for the game, thought I'd post my wip's here for advice and commentary, discussion, etc from you guys. ^_^ Hope you don't mind.

First I've made the shape of my land. I went with the chicken leg shape. =P

[Hyptosis]

Now I'm working on the shoreline and such. Trying to make it look believable, also my favorite part of map making. =]

[pyrandon]

Hey, Hyptosis, if you want, don't just share your wip, but give some hints on how you did what you do! Ex: how did you turn the basic shape into the believable shoreline?

Looks great, can't wait to see what you do next!

[Hyptosis]

Yes, I was trying to think of the best way to explain it, but really you just have to draw it. Make a one pixel wide hard edged brush, get in there and draw it. Then flood fill it. Try to think about where the mountains will be too, I use mountain ranges to pretty much shape my entire lands around, just because I think it adds a pretty wicked fantasy element, makes the land look young. I also love basing lands on crater impacts, like a few half circles filled with water. Looks wicked cool. =] My next few updates will hopefully shed more light.

[Hyptosis]

Alright, what I've done here is define the temperature zones, and determined where my mountains are going to me, then added bodies of water and rivers based on that info. I'm picturing this land mass a little bigger than california right now.

[Hyptosis]

All right, what I like to do is keep the black version of the map on it's own layer. In PhotoShop you can use ctrl click on the layer tab to select all, this way you can paint away like mad, and never go out of the lines so to speak. If you do paint out of the lines, you can always select all on the layer, and then clear on the layer you painted on. So keep you black map silhouette on one layer, and keep your art on another layer.

Now on my maps, I like to take a cartoon like approach. I love game maps more than anything, so mountains are huge, buildings are huge, sand dunes, are huge. So you can see I painted some gigantic sand dunes, these aren’t to scale, but are they to let the viewer know this is desert, above this I plan to add more clam dessert, with a few plants and some big cactus and stuff. I go about this as an illustrator would, conveying as much info through art as I can, which hopefully will mean I won’t need a legend when I’m done. =]


If you have any quesitons, let me know, or if if you want me to explain somethign better, I've odne this for so long I don't always know what needs to be explained.

Usually I build a grid system for messurments and stuff too, but I'm not going to with this map.

[ravells]

I love the sand dunes and desert. Just a worldbuilding question though - are the little islands likely to be deserts too?

I can't believe you did all the wiggly coastline bits by hand! I'm far too lazy and always look for quick fixes!

Ravs

[Hyptosis]

I don't honestly know O_o I added some greenery and like how it looks, but since, like, the ocean shore is usually sand too I'm not sure short of maybe a few grasses that there would need to be greenery on the shore line. I guess a desert could be near the sea or ocean if the wind conditions always carried the clouds away?

[Hyptosis]

Did a bit more work, still have some blending to do so the changes aren't so sudden.



Now for these, I painted a few good pieces of land, then copy pasted them togethor, then I go back over and smooth it out by hand, trying to break up the repetition, to keep the human eye form seeing the repeating so much.

[ravells]

This is looking beautiful. I love the work you've done around the coastline. What are the flat roundy brown things?