[Personal project] VTT map for paintball players in France.

[twister]

Greetings everyone !
I hope I'm posting in the right section. If not, a word and I'll move my post to a more appropriate place

I'm submitting for your appreciation a personal project I'm working on for the paintball players community I practice with (LARP/Milsim type paintball games), intended to become both a referencing tool for teams wishing to meet other teams and communities, experiment new fields, and fot organizers to help set up large scale campaings.

_ All based on a hexagon-shaped grid, I've isolated eleven field types, from Wasteland (junkyards, or recycled scraps obstacles) to deep forest, and even indoor or caves (yep, we have that type of fields to play in !!).

_ Each paintball field, wether kindly lent/rented by the owner, or professionnal field, would be described as a cluster of hexagons, based on a rough size estimate, and on its variety, each hexagon showing the type of ground the field has to offer.

_ All these clusters (I intend to reference as many fields as possible) are then to be gathered on a main grid, showing both said fields, and teams location (by its logo/patch or other means).

_ Once this is done, the map, main grid in itself would have to become kind of interactive (still working on a how/what with a computer engineer friend of mine), so any member could click and get intel on the team he wishes to challenge (number of players, type of favourite ground, special characters and so on), and propose a field for said challenge.

I can conceive the amount of work this project involves, but I've been in the paintball playing game since around 4/5 years ago, and organizing scene since about the same time (got the virus right away I might add ...) and I feel now that my knowledge of different fields and people I was led to meet allows me to either do it on my own, or invite organizers friends of mine in the journey, provided all the tools are in place. It's an ambitious project, but don't we need that to drive us ?


So here's what I got so far :


_ In terms of field classifications :



Let's note that all types aren't complete yet, the white doodles are just sketches I drew in my pocket notebook and scanned to fill in blanks. Anyways, it gives a general idea of how the layout would be. Also, I'm thinking of dropping the "field limit" entry, maybe switching it to something else, or making it white, given the dark background. Not sure yet ...

I just realized that forest and deep forest don't look that different when cropped down to a low resolution. I've been working too close to the details and didn't seem to pay enough attention to the overall readability of the tiles. I'll have to fix that ...



So far, just two types of field have been done, regular/mixed forest (and its twin, deep forest) and pinetrees forest (again, with its dense twin) :

Plain, regular forest :


Dense, deep forest :


Fairly spaced pinetrees (often encountered) :


Denser pinetrees


Urban


_ What the full grid looks like once all tiles would be assembled :




_ And a rough preview of what the map would look like in the end (not quite sure yet, it is bound to have subtle and/or main changes during the process) :



So, what do you guys think ?

I hope the function/goal of the map itself is clear, although it's still a work in progress, currently submitted to only a few people. It is also still to be cleared by my fellow "coding expert", who has been a great help with this. It will take some time, data gathering, actual mapmaking, glitches fixing and so on, so here is just the embryo of the whole thing. I also intend to add special features in terms of game rules, like special players/team abilities, typical to a field type, and specific to its "controller" during the game, or between games, so lots left to write, sketch and brainstorm on ...


Thanks for any comments ! Cheers !