The Map

World building is easy these days. There are many many tools to help you generate maps, lists of stats, cities, everything.

My personal favorite generator is Aazgar’s Fantasy Map Generator:

https://azgaar.github.io/Fantasy-Map-Generator/

The map generates countries, cities, cultures even, and their spread. It’s a great tool for any writer who wants to build on a world and has no idea where to start. Each map is fully editable and you can save them to your hard drive so you don’t lose them.

The map is highly detailed and is linked to a city generator, which gives you even more detail, and you can zoom in on a specific city in a specific country and select a building and decide exactly what it is, but..

That’s all it is, words. That’s worldbuilding. And so much of the work is already done for you. But, what if you wanted to build it.

A fully realized graphical world free to travel and explore.

Step one is the map. I’ve taken one of Azgaar’s maps and exported it into tiles, to get the highest definition I could in smaller, perfectly square packages:

I have the colored map, with its cities and countries on it, and I also have the height map.

So I am currently uploading the tiles into Unreal Engine one at a time, arranging them in order. Each tile will be a “level” load-able and unload-able as necessary.

After that I’m gonna build each town with assets from the unreal marketplace.

This part is going to take a long time, but it’s not the hard part.

Building the world is more than just maps and buildings. You’ve got to put life, stories, interaction. I want to fill it with people, both npcs and players, and I want to invite people to tell stories in this world. To create their own stories. No quests, no levels, just stories.

Is there a demand for that? An MMO designed for roleplay.

Stay tuned for another dev log.