Map for upcoming RPG, designed for incremental reveals

[Gidde]

Hiya! This project sounds really cool. My question is: will the battles take place on the map, or is there a separate battle screen? If separate are you also looking for battle maps?

[Lertulo]

Ah, excellent questions! (Sorry for the delay in responding; this project isn't part of my day job, so I have to wait until evenings to make progress.)

Example maps - Google produces so many choices, it's hard to pick any and say, "must look like this!" I'm looking for a simplistic close-to-hand-rendered effect, with muted colors and as much detail as you feel is appropriate, preferably rendered on parchment or similar. Something like this or this perhaps.

Resolution - My highest priority is to make sure the map is legible on the initial 480x800 screen; second priority would be to make it look good on a larger 1600x1200 screen for desktops. A higher resolution would indeed allow me to zoom in and fill the screen with mapped loveliness, but to justify that level of zoom I'd need to ask for more detail. If you can provide that, I'd be simply delighted to accept (and pay for) a higher-resolution map.

Isolation of revealed regions - A very perceptive observation. Once an area has already been conquered the player will not be returning there, so continuing to isolate already-revealed regions from their also-revealed neighbors is unnecessary--but it doesn't hurt, if it's easier to do that way. (For the curious, the player doesn't get an actual avatar standing on this map. Tapping on a revealed-but-not-yet-conquered region starts the battle there, and there are various items I'll superimpose on already-revealed areas--like trading posts or ships--that the user can again utilize by tapping.)

Fog of war - Thanks for the term; I indeed am familiar with it, but for some reason never thought to apply it here. You're correct that I'm a programmer (durned good one too, thankee very much), and as you suggest I'm good with several different approaches for implementing such a fog. Given the toolkits with which I'm working, I suppose the easiest thing for me would be to have individual opaquing masks for each region. As you suggest I'm indeed actually capable of producing those masks myself: just whip open my favorite paint program, rough out the individual regions on a separate layer, select a quarter of them (well spaced from each other), feather, wash, clip out the regions, save them individually and repeat for a different subset until I'm done--the only pain being getting the masks painted at the right spots. Unless someone has a better suggestion that's probably how I'll approach it--but I'd love such suggestions if you know of a better way.

Battle Maps - Oh, a very good question. The actual battle employs a different model: it uses playing pieces on a hexagonal game board combined with a Magic-like CCG as the basic mechanic. The individual hexes have associated terrain (my textures are rough but adequate--I hope), and I'll shape and terrain-match the hex playing board for a particular region to the corresponding portion of this Main Map. (I've already rolled up a quick and dirty hexmap editor to help put those together.) Each battle will take three to ten minutes to complete, with pieces moving around and players throwing spells at each other. I'm always and forever in need of decent artwork--for example, my playing pieces use white glyphs imposed (very nicely, mind you) on stone-textured discs, simply because I don't have time or talent for elaborate 2D rendering or 3D modeling.

[Juggernaut1981]

This smells a LOT like those Card-driven games like Successors and it's other relatives. I'd be interested, but I don't know if either

a) I am up to speed (as far as time)
b) I work in a style you like