The following is cartography we've developed during the development of Evensfell. Each of these maps represents a unique style of artwork that was developed to see what would work best within the framework of this game. These are all hand-drawn using Wacom tablets in Photoshop. Please feel free to give feedback on each! (Click any to enlarge)



This is the original world map for Evensfell. It is significantly outdated (as detailed in this post). While I have a love for this old style of map, the heavy use of dark lines (mountains, etc.) prevents use in a game setting where we need text and markers to be clearly visible without obstructing the visual experience.




This is the current world map and can be considered canon. This is still a work in progress so I've silhouetted the image and masked the ocean. This is being developed as a geographical overlay map (examples below) and the final product will act as our global view. We would like to have separate, interconnected regional maps for the player locations as well, which is why you'll see more close-up styles below.




This is the first geographical map I worked in, which is to say it was the first time I didn't use symbols to represent mountains and locations. Learning the shadows and contours for this was very difficult and doing it in such a limited setting made a few things easier. I was happy with the finished product but it still left me with a lot to learn, especially as it related to the actual creation of mountains. This also left me with a (still important) question as to how to present cities in a hand-drawn map or whether to try to at all.




This is my re-take on the above map, this time with fully fleshed ridges and rivers. The peninsula on the bottom right came out better than the rest in terms of the contour of the mountain, so I definitely think my handling of shadows improved a lot there. The ridges lose definition towards all the edges and I was running into the same problem of presenting actual mountains. Though ridges do exist independent of large mountains all throughout the world, I needed to make sure that I could make this style integrate with whatever style the full mountains took.



This is the direction I went with mountains. I'm not happy with the snow though fortunately that is not something I need to get into for the release regions of the localized maps. This style went a lot more in the direction of brushes and painting and made a lot less use of countour lines. However, relaxing of lines did make it possible to do hyper-realistic water lines through the valleys. The ridges in this version have good qualities but my aim is to add extensive detailing to them and adjust their shapes to reduce unnatural curving.



How will these be implemented in Evensfell?
As a browser-based game with little money and a very small development crew we made a decision early on that maps would be our primary method of delivering great visuals to the player. For this reason, our game maps are going to be a part of almost everything you do within the game, from city and kingdom building to combat to nautical adventures. As often as possible we want you to be looking at and interacting with a rich, movable map interface. We have been developing a specialized DeepZoom-based Silverlight engine around exactly this concept.

We're taking the approach of treating our maps like new game content. We want a huge game world for players but we absolutely will not get to that by automating or randomly generating with software. Instead, we're going to hand-draw every new region and we add to the game with the understanding that it may take a long time -- likely years -- before the entire game world is viewable and accessible in a congruous way. Until that time, regions will be treated as separate zones accessed from the world map.

All of this is subject to change, of course. We're still developers in the early stages of creating what we hope is an awesome game experience.