Yesterday I created a couple random overworld maps and pondered which to use.
I decided to use the first one as my base, but really used it as a general inspiration.
Trying to exactly replicate this map wasn’t really feasible. Precisely placing 2,500 tiles is awfully tedious, and the base tilesets don’t have quite the variety shown here.
Instead, I try to retain the general feel of this map, while adding a few tropish elements such as a really inconveniently placed mountain range with a conveniently placed (but dangerously-populated) cave/mine system through it.
Things are still pretty sparse. Even for such a large map (almost the size of Great Britain, if each tile is 6 miles across), going the long way around from the island in the northeast quadrant to the town just west of the center of the map doesn’t take that long.
Of course, there are no encounters built into the map yet, nor other things that can slow the journey. I feel like I’d like to make it so traveling overland is inconvenient enough that finding shortcuts will be a good idea.
I found that I’m really not fond of the base tileset. I already mentioned that it’s pretty limited, but honestly, I also don’t much like how it looks. I expect to construct (probably from DLC and other content I have) my own tilesets before I’m done, and might end up parallax mapping (i.e. drawing raster maps in other tools that will be rendered on top of these ones, so they look more cohesive and prettier).
In the meantime, this’ll do. This current game is a scratch project while I work out how various tools and techniques work. All I really need is a place to put stuff, and this should serve that purpose quite adequately.