Ideas about my Map
Posted: Mon Apr 27, 2020 11:07 am
Hi, I'm making a VN which features heavy gameplay mechanics in the style of old-school merchant games like The Patrician (the first one). I want it to take place in a fantasy version of "totally not Earth", meaning that it should be reminiscent of actual Earth, but different. Reminiscent because the player can sort of anticipate what to expect and it makes the world believable, different because I can get away with plot and artistic freedom.
Before I go on, here is my current map:
Huge, right? It's the whole world after all.
Originally, the map ended about where the southern deserts are now, but it bothered me that a) the equator wasn't in the center and b) there were two continents cut off by the edge of the map. So I finished the rest.
But I am starting to get the impression that this large of a map will overwhelm the player who can only be in one place at a time, with many places feeling and playing exactly the same unless I go out of my way to fill them all with story. Especially the southern continents make me wonder what to put there.
Now I was thinking of just confining the game to the northern hemisphere and give the planet a belt of land around the equator, acting as a natural border for nautic travel, and that would certainly solve a few of my problems, but I really like the shape my "antarctica" has. I could just flip it and put it somewhere in the north, but then its fjords would be at the same latitude as "Spain" and "France". So maybe scale it down?
I don't particularly like the shapes of the "Americas" either, so I could maybe put the southern continents there instead?
At this point I'm just "thinking loudly", and maybe your thoughts about this could help my creative process.
Before I go on, here is my current map:
Huge, right? It's the whole world after all.
Originally, the map ended about where the southern deserts are now, but it bothered me that a) the equator wasn't in the center and b) there were two continents cut off by the edge of the map. So I finished the rest.
But I am starting to get the impression that this large of a map will overwhelm the player who can only be in one place at a time, with many places feeling and playing exactly the same unless I go out of my way to fill them all with story. Especially the southern continents make me wonder what to put there.
Now I was thinking of just confining the game to the northern hemisphere and give the planet a belt of land around the equator, acting as a natural border for nautic travel, and that would certainly solve a few of my problems, but I really like the shape my "antarctica" has. I could just flip it and put it somewhere in the north, but then its fjords would be at the same latitude as "Spain" and "France". So maybe scale it down?
I don't particularly like the shapes of the "Americas" either, so I could maybe put the southern continents there instead?
At this point I'm just "thinking loudly", and maybe your thoughts about this could help my creative process.