Doubts (public) Developmental log

[Intrepid42]

Those look absolutely quaffable! Well, maybe not the last one.

[Snowmane]

Very nice art assets. Great work Doubtful.

[Kitsunestume]

Those look absolutely quaffable! Well, maybe not the last one.

Are you kidding? The last one it TOTALLY quaffable! Clearly the dwarven constitution is unprepared for some simple things like chemical concoctions, casting the entire principle behind Delver ale in doubt.

Doubt, superb work, as usual. I'm hoping the models ingame are lower poly but just as detailed. I look forwards to more!

[Doubtful]

Sunday(ish) update II

New scary thing is now 85% done, it's been a busy week and I haven't had the time I'd have liked to get on with it. Wedding prep takes most of my energy at the moment and can quickly turn a cheerful evening into a dour and miserable one!

What scant time I have may get a little more scarce - I've been invited to design and prototype a range of toys! Pretty awesome stuff and a bucket load of fun, trouble is it may tie me up for the next couple of weeks. I will find the time to do some occasional work on Sundren stuff though and I'm sure I'll be ever-angry here on the forums, after all I'd be pretty lost without you lovely folk to get angry at! Plus I wanna set my creations on you and laugh.

As I don't want to reveal the current thing I've had to delve back through past (but still twitching) projects to show you today - Here's the first few rough sheets of a new and updated world map!

Anyway, rough as sandpaper.



Ciao!

[wangxiuming]

Yay new map!

[Intrepid42]

And... there we are. Awesome.

[thaelis]

It just me or does one of those Keeps have a candle on top? Candlekeep! Or New Candlekeep as it would be aptly named.

[Doubtful]

Looking at the map a few of them do!

It's a bad bit of visual shorthand I picked up from copying a certain old map's city references, now whenever I noodle out a city indicator I have to try and remember not to stick a tower/candle on it!

Ultimately all the cities should get clear little indicators like the Sestra and Avanthyr ones all roughed up on the side.

I need to pull together lots of references from things like the Cosmographie universelle and and the Olaus Magnus marine map though, I love the details on those kind of things, but will probably take a later approach to the actual terrain.

[Kitsunestume]

Someone should make transparent cartological stickers of various sizes, just for stuff like this. Then you can canoodle through your map, and smack down perfectly formed icons at the appropriate places.

Otherwise, looking good.

Also, it looks like that drawing is on tracing paper over a line-map of rivers and coastlines. Is the outline map available?

[Doubtful]

It's on trace, yes - But what you see below is just another piece of trace with an outline map on it.

I printed our existing map out at A4 then traced the coast, rivers and islands to use as a base, the top layer was a first attempt at the mountain ranges, I wasn't happy with the results so used it as a bit of a test bed for ideas, hence the different line thicknesses on the coast, different hatchings and extremely rough forests and crude landmarks.

All the different bits'll be drawn on different layers of trace, then everything gets scanned, run through Illustrator, tweaked coloured and set to rights then comped together in photoshop.

[Saulus]

The Icewind Dale/Northern region has always been the most poorly represented place on the map, due in part to Icewind Dale not being part of the original design.

So far; it certainly looks better than the existing map representation.

[Doubtful]

What we need are three seperate world maps, each with a different style but laid out in such a way as to unify them all. I've got a reasonable idea for it, I just need to rough it all up.


Anyway, all this mapping talk made me go all off topic on my work schedule tonight! Thought I'd start trying to breathe a little personality into the Sundren City map at long last (been meaning to make a start on this for so, so long).



It's a start

[Saulus]

Looks great, only other thing I would say is it would be nice to ditch all the NWN2 icons we use on the map and have unique ones for each location.

[Doubtful]

Oh definitely, the little town logos doodled on the bottom left of the world map will get worked up into the appropriate icons. Sestra, Avanthyr and the Viridale Fort are shown there.

We could also just try having crosses and marks on the map, or even something slightly completely different, there is something I might try...

[Doubtful]

Haven't really made any progress on anything this week - A big opportunity came up at work and I had to throw myself into drawing up a new CV and cover letter plus attending various meetings and a crash course in role familiarization! It also means I've missed loads of important topics and things, so sorry all round.

Even the limited tool time I did manage was a little rambling, playing with a hawk themed (plus barn owl variant) elven plate armour, a freaky ass Blight Dryad and some on-topic Blackwood armour. Next week should be better, evil early shifts but it'll mean some work time in the afternoons. I can focus on getting stuff in-game.

The image for this weeks update is from the currently set-aside Ixis Expansion project (I've been quite rightly advised to stick to one topic and see it to completion, everything else is on hold). It's built to fit on the existing dog-leg skeleton so it can use all the existing animations. Once this basemesh was completed I'd have worked through to make several armour variants with a suitably Tribal Island/South American feel.