Hello! FEB here. All images are large if you open them in a separate tab! Title artwork done by Centipest, who also did a bunch of things for us before.
This month has been a busy one, with my job and social life taking up a lot of my time. In this diary, I'd like to talk about working with archaic game structures, designing pretty maps,
I worked on the mod when I could, and amid my general self-organization I have decided to go back, look at the strategic map and decide if I wanted to re-do it from scratch. It would be the third time around, but looking at the rather schematic forests and spiky off-color mountains for about 10 minutes finally broke my will. So, here we have it: strat map, version 3.0. This means moving settlements and rivers, reworking heightmap and ground textures, and possibly more. This time around I started with a moodboard of sorts.
Here are some of the pictures I used for inspiration. These include official illustrations to the Redwall novels, paintings from the era of romanticism and illustrations inspired by those paintings. Mr. Jacques was heavily inspired by authors like Robert Louis Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling, and even wrote some boyhood sea adventures himself (Castaways of the Flying Dutchman). In the Redwall series, this feeling of colonial-era swashbuckling mixes with Arthurian mysticism and a very hobbit-like rural English cosiness. I think this assortment of neoclassic-like images captures this vibe well.
I also used earlier battlemap screenshots to hopefully translate the feeling into stratmap. While talking about this to my friend Urbgen of Insularis Draco I got a wonderful suggestion to use the same tree models. These originate in the old Princes, Kings and Generals mod. After obtaining a permission from the file keeper Makanyane, I imported them without much problems.
As you can see, some textures broke here. This happened because the new models came with a revamped climate system designed to replicate the nature of Great Britain. Naturally, it has 4 types of swamps. I had to adjust it a bit to fit the niche design of Mossflower, and with some texture work it came out pretty nice. Finally, Urbgen came through with another great lesson and enlightened me to the art of stealing geographical features. Here's our unfortunate victim: the map of the British Isles. In a gruesome act of vivisection, we will be ripping out mountains and scooping up hills to drop onto our map.
After dropping in the terrain along previously existing geographic landmarks (major mountains and bodies of water) I smoothed the transitions over and deleted some features. Smaller rivers went along the newly created valleys, and settlements were moved to more sensible positions. In the end, I ended up with a look close to what I would like to see in the finished product.
Old Moss Valley and Lilygrove
And finally. Finally. The dreaded South-of-Redwall CTD is GONE. This is not a drill, it has vanished inexplicably and didn't even wave goodbye. Next update with a semi-finished campaign map will be CTD FREE.
So! Thanks for reading. I hope to do more mapping in June and add the missing factions to strat map (Long Patrol, Minor Warlords). Hopefully the campaign will be a little more playable by then.
You can chat about the mod, the novels and everything else on my Discord server: Discord.gg
See you all late June!
Looks so good!
Thank you!
Wild stuff!
Glad you like thr mod!