Map Rough
This is a quick rough map that I sketched out today. It took about 2 hours or so.
As I have stated before, I am now feeling more confident about my game idea being about a Ranger who works in a woods. Now, I don't have the name yet and I will do a redesign to make it look more official, but let me explain bits and pieces about it.
The first thing is the shape. I looked at different hiking trails and national parks in America (as a Ranger is more known to be in America) and here is a collage of these maps (I just looked up hiking trail map- key):
As you can see, most of the maps I did look at were of ones you would probably see at a national park! I will try and take this approach more when it comes to the finial design of my map for my game. This map will be dotted around parts of the trail and could even be on your character's person (maybe this could be for different modes of difficulty- easy gets the map and harder difficulty you have to rely on memory).
Overall, this map has been clearly inspired by the Grand County park of Colorado. I did really like the shape and I felt like it for now, it would help me get across a rough layout for the general space of the park.
One thing I also want to add about the layout, is that I want to make it engaging for my players. I want them to have enough space to explore across the world of this park, but have to make sure they know where the safe places are/ the objective points. The more they dawdle the more they might see of the things that lurk in the dark!
Now that I have a rough layout of paths and of the terrain (the right side being more rocky), I will try and refine it, have different shapes for the map to see what fits and even add in events that could force the player back to certain places: ie, a tree falls and you have to backtrack or choose to cut right through the woods.
This being set at night will also make it good for things such as sound cues and rustling bushes that may scare the player even more than what they could actually see.
So now, my plan of action will be to get everything ready for my presentation tomorrow with my peer review on my idea (have all my pictures and things in one place for ease) and then once I get the feedback from that, apply it where it needs to be fit before I think about drawing the map again and moving onto more concept works!
Written and drawn on November 5th 2020.