Hi everyone! In a sense, maps have been my career :)

[Justin]

Hello!

I'm Justin.
I've designed and built a lot of areas/places in video games, a process that starts with creating maps of the area and then building the world from the map; totally backwards from the usual order of cartography!
So mapping in various senses of the word has been part of my job. But I joined here after stumbling on it during research for a personal project I recently started that is much more directly about cartography. My project will (hopefully) be an indie game which, as the player explores the world, involves making a map of it. (Most games auto-map for you so you can go shoot something, but this game isn't about fighting and puts more focus on mapping)
So not only does this forum have discussion and resources for the mapping side of things, but it also has potential guinea pigs! (I figure some people here might be interested in playing a game that involves more map-making than other games, which could offer a way for me to find out how the game could best cater to the kind of people who might like it)

Anyway, that's all a long time in the future - things are still all very preliminary right now.

See you around!
- J

[Redrobes]

I have been a video gamer for many years, perhaps not the extreme end of the scale and not as good as most. But in the last couple of years especially all the games look the same. They are all 3D shooters with no gameplay. Anything which pushes the emphasis away from the grist mill that shovels out the same game with new skins on the characters would be great news to me. Was playing (or at least tried to play) RayMan 3D last night from the freebie xbox download and its unplayable. Went back to RayMan Origins as a side scroller / platform game and its great. Same with plants vs zombies and so on. So your idea gets my vote but then you are on the mapping guild site so maybe that can be expected.

I tell you what I would be interested in knowing about is the process you used to do to generate the video game maps. I did part of the Middle Earth in Outerra which is a sort of game engine. Robbie here has done some game engine maps and we have a lot of interest in Blender and 3D mapping. Would be good to know what sort of people make the design maps then the process of converting them into game engine data / assets.

We have had a lot of people here wanting to make maps for games but not many who have experience of actually doing it.

[- JO -]

Hello and Welcome !

As a video gamer, I would be very interested in your project... I have no competences at all in game designing, but I play for a long time now and I've tried a lot of games. Your idea seems very different from main stream video games, and that a good thing ! Let us know where you are with your project !