World Building Blog

GENERAL UPDATE

Well, it’s one of those times. “Those times” being when “I’ve been struggling with getting any art, design, ‘or anything, really’ done because I’m a total perfectionist and it’s so much easier to just spend forever researching +/- 37 different things simultaneously” (ranging, of course, from how pteradons fly to the best way to scientifically (and most painfully) determine exactly where in a particular binary star system the life zone – a.k.a habitable zone or Goldilocks zone – would fall).

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WORLDS OF SAND

Fortunately, I’ve been insanely fortunate enough to be selected as a finalist-interviewee – a writing position – for an indie game company currently working on their first big project, which happens to be based on some of my favorite themes/genres, movies, game-types, etc. The company is Starboard Games L.L.C. (links tp FB page) and the game is called INT (short for Interstellar). While this blog has been primarily about art, design, and more “visual-creative” projects, I’ve been world building – and creating languages – for years now (almost a decade, and that’s not counting the totally-uneducated attempts I made back in middle school).

In the interest of not only continuing to explore those areas of interest but also to get all the research I’ve done and ideas I’ve been exploring out there to share and discuss with other people, I’ve decided that now is a great time to start a blog specifically for world-building and all that goes into that (or can, at least)! Taking the first step applying for this writing job has been a great push forward towards the blog, but whatever happens with the job itself – all power to them, the idea sounds great – I’m looking forward to writing again. Well, writing in a “public forum” and getting feedback and having discussions, anyway. All the writing I’ve been doing recently has been kept … under wraps, so to speak.

Perhaps I’ve reached a kind of “critical mass” in terms of the amount of information I’ve amassed. Now it’s time to actually make use of it all, even if I end up just sharing it and helping others use it for their own epic ends.

 

Building Avencourt

Well, I’m still working on this map and finally making some real progress towards a completed draft. The image above is a top-down parallel projection view from within SketchUp, with all the buildings redrawn to fit within the new walls & towers layout. I increased the size of the Royal Palace and the walls around it (on the inside of the town), and I drew in entirely new building footprint shapes within the Royal Palace district itself, for the most part. At the moment, the only thing missing is the Tartarus Prison (other than the terrain, which I’ll be adding in by hand during the final pass). I’ve been having some trouble placing it just right in Sketchup, and since most of the prison itself is actually underground, I think I may just set it up once I get the map into Photoshop for tweaking.

I still plan on printing out the map and tracing over it by hand in pen to get the best hand-drawn quality for the lines. Below is an idea of the town in parallel projection (again, just a SketchUp screenshot):

The colors in both these images are just part of the SkU style I selected to make the images more readable. The final colors will be more in keeping with the 17th century style of the maps referenced by the client.