The more technical side of the Patreon are getting a home - Egos!
It will be a (infinite?) series of areas 150 miles to the side. Maybe this can be increased to 200 miles or more, but for the first project set in Egos, Island, it will be 150 miles. Three times the size of the Crater project.
My idea with this is to try and make my development maps useful and useful together in a larger context, like a whole continent. The image shows the terrain types and additional types of maps that I want to cover.
With all the climate types and variations it will be almost a hundred different variations. Doing 10 a year means that it will take a decade to cover every type, but I'm betting on having better tools and faster computers in the future and will try and make it in less than 5 years.
This will be the development side of the Patreon, and the other half will be the implementation side of it. For that I'm planning to do maps set in Greyhawk mostly and then maybe other settings as well if there are good grounds for developing for them.
Why not use Greyhawk for development?
The main reasons are simplicity, by not having to map a particular world and match its existing maps, I can condense features to better suit my development needs.
The Flanaess lacks several of the terrain types I want to have in my set of "recipes", and I also need to create the in between terrain types. Using a world that I can set things to be as effective as possible in developing the technological side can work out the kinks before risking things on a real campaign setting.
The second reason is that when areas are developed I can sell the maps on contents markets and earn some extra money, which means need to spend less time working on other things.
Long term goals
When this project is more underway in a year or so there will be a more and more useful set of templates usable for other projects, like mapping Campaign Settings and iconic locations. If the Patreon is successful enough there will be opportunities for others (preferably Patreons) who can be hired on a freelance basis to help me with creation of content.
Another goal is to introduce other specialties and invite experts in those fields to help out in both creation and teaching techniques. I'm thinking city mapping, 3D object creation, buildings and dungeon mapping.
There are already several fantastic Patreons that does this, and I hope to be able to establish some sort of cooperation that will make the content we can produce both higher quality and be done faster using experts in respective areas. But this is all a year or more in the future.
Short term goals
The next couple of months my plan is to do the Island Project part 1 and 2, and Egos Island and Lendore Isle.
The next project I want to do is a subcontinent with at least two new climate types that we didn't cover in any of the island projects. The main goals for this project is to test scale and scope. I want to make sure things doesn't brake down when I start working on a 1000 square miles, and that things can be reassembled properly after rendering.
A side goal with this project is to get another set of climate and terrain types covered as well. Since Lendore Isle sits in the Seasonal to Warm Seasonal zones, we need to go either far north or down towards the tropics for the subcontinent. This need to be debated and polled when we get closer.
A third goal for the subcontinent project is to figure out what need to be stored in order for maps to be expanded and worked on later. If possible I want to avoid having to export every bit of terrain and masks as high resolution TIFFs. Hopefully the World Machine TMD files will be enough, which means whole world can be store in a few hundred MB rather than a few hundred GB.
