The Forgotten Expedition – Dev Diary #1: Making the map

So stupidly, I had not thought to create a dev diary until now. I had used Python a little before starting this game, but never beyond FreeCodeCamp or one or two lessons at University. Due to this, whilst I was making the game, I was so focused on learning new concepts that I didn’t really think to also commentate on what I was doing. To be honest, you can find how I started the game by simply following the guide at Rogueliketutorials. Well, maybe that’s a bit disingenuous, that was probably the first week of development and the rest has all been trial and error afterwards.

I actually got the idea to create a roguelike whilst I was reading a blog post by Kyzrati, the creator of Cogmind, about the making of roguelikes. I have always enjoyed playing roguelikes with my personal favourites being DCSS, Caves of Qud and CDDA and wanted to try my hand at creating one. Anyone who has played my games before know that I don’t really ever focus on the graphics or art (mainly because I’m terrible at it) and roguelikes are kind of the poster child for bad graphics. I find a lot of games can be restricted in what the player can do because its really hard to make the assets or animations for it, whereas in a roguelike you can be as creative as possible with just a single tile.

Anyway, back to the point of this dev diary, the Map!

As I just said, I am terrible at art. I assumed using just ASCII characters would make this easier to do, I was wrong. Thankfully, I am using a tool named REXPaint (also made by the creator of Cogmind) which has allowed me to create, in my opinion, a really nice looking overworld map.

I’ve tried to be as historically accurate as possible with the map as well. This is a bit challenging as seemingly ever map seems to be slightly different and even looking at satellite images change perspectives so much. I also have to balance realism with actually making an engaging world. My poor browser is filled with 50+ tabs all with various images of northern South America.

I started the map by finding information about where El Dorado was supposedly meant to be and what journeys the actual explorers took. I found this map below and this game me a good starting point.

I then found an image of Gran Columbia, which I then edited to focus on the areas I wanted.

I then ran it through an image to ascii editor and was left with the below.

Now, as you can see, not very detailed, but it roughly has the right shape. I then began looking at images of roughly the same area both historically and current day to see what the area would look like. As an example, is it sandy, grassy, forrest, mountain? How much has changed between now due to climate change or deforestation and more importantly how can I implement as many different biomes into my game as possible whilst retaining some realism and keeping it fun.

I’ve attached a few examples below of what I used as a reference.

With the help of REXPaint, I then began to add the features such as mountains, hills, lakes etc and then began adding some key settlements. A lot of this is very much likely to change as I actually integrate it into the game and then find a lot of it needs balancing or making more fun, rather than particularly accurate. Again, this is very much WIP and is almost certainly expected to change before the game is released (in fact, at this stage, the map isn’t even in the game and instead the overworld is still procedually generated!).

That’s all for now, I hope you have enjoyed seeing a bit of the process and I will update once its all in the game and working.