May/June Lite Entry: Gulf of Malabor

[gilgamec]

Hi, all! Long time lurker, first time poster here. This month's Lite Challenge seems like as good a time as any to try my hand (as well as forcing me to actually make progress!)

My main problem is that I can't draw; no, not at all. I'm also not especially artistic. Fortunately, I have a degree in computer graphics, so I can play to my strengths and try to make a map completely procedurally. Ideally, I'll be able to press a button and get a new map every time. I'm going to have to sacrifice some niceties, of course, but hopefully I can design around that too.

So, I'll try to develop a reasonable procedural style over the next month, and hopefully post some WIPs here as I go.

First things first. We need coastline and islands. Let's try a sea basin, surrounded by the mainland, a couple of islands, and a peninsula. I pulled out the ol' tablet and sketched a simple outline:


Now to make it a little more rugged, we add a little fractal noise to get


Looks decent enough for a first start. Add a little splash to get my first checkpoint.