Wow, thanks for all the feedback! I suppose I should have given more information on what this world is for, I was going to in my original post but decided to keep it simple.
Basically, this world is the result of a small minecraft server, almost 2 years running. We've started with one town, and built more and grew out into several nations, etc. We went through a few world changes, and Id decided I want a "final" world, with enough room for all of the places we want. Now, this world definitely isn't Minecraft centric anymore, I want to develop a world that stands on its own. But I also plan on converting it to a Minecraft world aswell, so I want this world to be.. Minecraft "friendly". Basically what this means is.. I want my maps to be flat and not distorted, a perfect translation to the minecraft world that is based on it. Because Minecraft is flat. Once I settle on a continent shape and decide where mountains and rivers will be, I will be creating a heightmap based on those things, which will end up being the image used to generate the flat minecraft worlds.
Now, I had imagined this world on a globe of course, and even meant for the world to wrap around east to west at the edges. So Ive obviously got a dilemma, but being as its a fantasy world, I suppose I could either
A) Ignore distortion and pretend like nothings wrong, of course like you said this will be obvious to cartographers that somethings amiss or,
B) Have the world actually be a giant flat slab, with the ocean running off of the ends. This wasn't ever originally a part of my plan, but Ill have to think about it.
Regardless of what I end up doing, I am almost positive I want the world to be flat without distortion. So ill definitely have to consider my options, thanks for bringing it up.
As for plate tectonics, another thing I should have mentioned at the beginning is basically a replacement for that. In the lore of the world, It used to be one continent. After a few thousand years, a large "earth-shattering" event happens in which the land is broken and pieces are pushed away, like a ton of plate-tectonic moving in one day, essentially. That's also the reason for some of the crack shapes cutting into the land, such as the large one on the northern continent, to kind of show a result of that breaking and shattering of the world. I do feel like the pieces could be pushed back together and fit nicely, just as you can see on Earths map.
I do realize that I made almost all of the coasts jagged and whatnot, I guess I knew I had a problem with that. Same with there not being any really large inland areas. Problem is at this point I feel reluctant to change that and essentially remove some of my crafted bays and peninsulas and seas and islands.
One more obstacle Im running into is also relating to Minecraft. I want the world to be portrayed in game as large as possible, (obviously its going to be scaled way down, not unlike how the Elder Scrolls games have done) But theres definitely a limit on how big these worlds can be. I thought I could make a few continents, and have each minecraft game world just encompass one continent, and have 3-4 game worlds. This is having a design restriction on my continent shapes and placement because I wanted each continent to be able to fit nicely into a rectangle for each minecraft world.
The km measurements are in game, not the "actual" size of the continents.
I realize the whole Minecraft conversion is putting several restraints on my world, but I am aiming to end up with something that both looks really good on its own, and is convertible to Minecraft, essentially. Because I want to be able to actually go in to this world, build its cities, etc. And make some nice looking maps as reference for me and other players on my server.
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