I’m mostly satisfied with the landmass placements now. The original remake had too many islands, at least in the sense that there were no ‘barren’ coastlines like on Earth. That felt unrealistic, and I wasn’t going to lean on one of the plausible lore explanations just to keep them. Instead, I tried clearing out the northern half of the map and moving a bunch of things around. There’s more here that changed than I can really point out. A direct comparison would probably be better.

Lots and lots of islands disappeared. This is the last WIP you’re going to see that’s completely flat. I’m familiar with my new tools and comfortable diving in headfirst from here. Even if I have to move landmasses again down the road, it shouldn’t negatively impact the look of the actual terrain. I always liked abusing layers anyway, so this should be simple. The real challenge has been figuring out a way to make the most usable, somewhat photorealistic map I can. I’m going with a combination of custom terrain brushes scoured from the internet and my old technique of just poking at things one patch of pixels at a time until everything looks nice.

I’ll post updates on the blog during every phase of the project. I’ll also link the posts together so you can start from the beginning and quickly look through the whole process.

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