Thread: Valena

Its a decent game map. Its good to see the city laid out and the layout clearly.

I think you might find that its a little uniform and 'cartoony'. If you make variations in building shape and land contour it may feel a little more realistic. Mix up the distance between houses and the shapes a bit if you are drawing the _actual_ houses. Areas like the green swath on the west bank look much more satisfying. I think, because the viewer is more ready to accept them as abstract. The more realism the viewer wants the more the map Symbols look too uniform.

Campaign Cartographer is a great program for building and perfecting cities. You may find that some tweaking for realism helps bring up the over all image. There are some great tutorials on the site if you want to vary your style a little bit.


I think Dragon Magazine used CC3 and then punched up the image in Photoshop. Perhaps working in two programs might help.

Sigurd

Strange, but when one looks at photos of cities in Europe in their midieval architecture, its common to find rows of buildings where each structure is attached to the next.

So often when I see city maps here, every building has a yard or alley around it, in other words most structures are stand-alone. In midieval settings this is simply not that common.

Perhaps smaller communities, especially villages would feature stand-alone buildings, but not so in cities.

Your spacing seems way too uniform to be realistic, but as I say, don't feel bad, most city maps here and made in similar fashion, if not so evenly spaced.

GP

I have to agree with Gameprinter. It is something I try and emulate all the time in my city maps.

See the attached image for a view of real world Napoli.

In addition check the following link for real world medieval city maps. You can see that at the time, the citymaps depict cramped rows of tenements and buildings.

http://www.holycross.edu/departments...toric_maps.htm

I think it is a great map, and very clear. I think the different colours are a good way of representing the different quarters of the city. The one suggestion I'd chime in with is that there are very few farms in the map for the city. A city that size is a huge market for food. Every square metre outside the city walls will be cultivated for farmland, simply because all of those people need to be fed.