Time is almost up. The end of my Holiday Break, Holiday PTO and it’s back to work tomorrow. It was really awesome having a “permanent” set up for my tablet. It had sat on my desk since I had started my blitz and now it’s back to putting it aside. I’ve gotten so much done in a matter of a couple of days. I’m happy and proud and pretty tired actually.
Tonight I mainly worked on the Northern snowy continent where Bone Village, Icicle Inn and the Northern Crater sits. I thought it was going to be good and I’d be able to finish it. Well, turns out after reviewing all of the screenshots I had taken last night, there are parts of the land and geography that were a bit off from my initial template. Long story short, this turned out to be a huge mess and has taken me hours of redoing different parts of this land.
The left image is what I started out with tonight. The right is a result of several hours of redo’s, frustration and also from different learnings that I got to discover along the way. You can see the East side of the continent is a bit different to accommodate what I saw from the in-game reference screenshots. As well as the orientation of the gorge where the City of the Ancients is located. I originally had the gorge horizontal when it’s actually more North-South. I had Bone Village closer to the gorge when there’s definitely a good amount of forest that separates the two. One the Eastern side of the continent there was this “fish tail” that was in the screenshot and I guess it was very simplified in my original build of the template. I had to really reconfigure the land and fix it. It took a lot of fenagling and many hours of changes, but I think I’m happy with the end result.
I was definitely drawing rough lines, just trying to understand and translate what I’m seeing in the screenshot and just trying to get close to what I can do on my map. I suppose if you were to just see my map, you’d know what it was if you played the game. The little details is just the extra cherry on top. This whole project is just about seeing an idea I had through to completion. And I know I’ve said somewhere on this blog that, there was a time where things felt out of reach, that this dream project might just be a dream or is something I don’t think I can see through to the end. I still have that fear and many other fears but I think I’m mostly sick and tired of waiting for it to get done. I just need to do it.
As of 11:46pm CST, my progress blitz is over. I hope that doesn’t happen again next year. As much fun that all was, I was missing playing some Stardew Valley or finishing Crisis Core Final Fantasy VII (which was actually the trigger to get me to get back to revive this project), or literally any other game that I bought during the Steam Black Friday and Winter sales. I’ll need to figure out a balance and just keep reminding myself of my progress goals for this year.