Since this is the first post in the “Worldbuilding series”, I’ll be explaining a little bit about that now. Over the years, there have been a bunch of video games I’ve wanted to make. It ranges from typical RPGs, to Super Smash Bros. clones, to Pokemon-type games, to 1000 Blank White Cards, and more. I was more into the story of games (which is why I liked Super Smash Bros. Brawl’s Subspace Emissary), so most of my games involve worldbuilding. The worldbuilding I did ranges from game to game, as some I wrote more story and others I drew more maps, etc.
A friend of mine and I got to talking about maps recently and how he had made a fantasy map for his own worldbuilding project in the past. I remembered that years ago, I was drawing my own map of a Pokemon based world (with fake Pokemon I had made up for it). Now this map went through a lot, because I was playing with it, and imagining the history happening with whatever toys I had at the time. So this map is old, beat up, faded, and has tape everywhere. Some of the tape is to keep it together (it’s 6 pieces of notebook paper), some is to patch it up, and some is to tape more scraps of paper to change the map based on events that happened. Also I used both sides of this thing.
Back in the day, I had a lot of fake Pokemon drawn up for it, but I don’t think I wrote down much (if any) of the story for that world. In terms of map size, it was definitely the biggest world project I had. Later worlds would involve entire universes, but the maps weren’t as detailed. In January 2010, I had decided I hated Pokemon and ripped up most of the papers involved in this project, so there’s a lot lost now from it. For the record, I’m back into Pokemon again, though nowhere near as strongly as before.
Anyway, I took some pictures of some of the maps from the projects I worked on, and I ended up making one side of the big map into a couple computer renders.
So here’s the original picture of the map:
And then here’s the first computer render I made, where I used the temperature color mapping for the land and made it look like it’s on an old piece of paper (computer style instead of using the real paper):
Then I made one that’s just blue for the water and the computer style old paper color for the land, still using the old piece of paper look overall:
I plan to also make a render that includes the island names and territories, but that’s for another time. I do like how these two above turned out. I don’t know if I’ll do anything further than that or not, but I have some ideas.
Some things I don’t know though:
- What is the UFO-like thing near the center on the original? My only guess is it was a portal that some legendary Pokemon came out of, but you see other portals that are drawn differently.
- What are the stickers for? Are they decorations, or did they actually mean something at some point?
Edit 8/20/2020: I realized I didn’t go into my worldbuilding projects beyond this Pokemon-type world. Also I have this tagged as OHRRPGCE, which is never mentioned, so here’s some more info:
This world was certainly the most thought-out in terms of the map and at the time most thought out story-wise (with the events going on as I played with this world), but I did worldbuilding for other worlds in the future. One of the most noteworthy (which I have mentioned in other posts at some point) is that I wanted to make some RPGs using OHRRPGCE at one point. OHRRPGCE stands for “Official Hamster Republic Role Playing Game Construction Engine” and was (or is, I haven’t kept up with if it still exists) a program to make it easy to make a tile-based RPG. I believe that this big Pokemon map project was in my mind when I was using OHRRPGCE, but it’s hard to know for sure. With OHRRPGCE, I had plans to make a series of 7 games in a single universe, and the people in it were more human than Pokemon (I think I used shape-based humanoid creatures). The world wasn’t as thought out as this one, but I made several maps for it along with planning some of the history / plot of this world.
Those OHRRPGCE game ideas got me inspired to work on TAG (a.k.a. T.A.D.U.K.O.O. I.S. T.H.E. G.R.E.A.T.E.S.T. P.E.R.S.O.N. W.H.O. E.V.E.R. L.I.V.E.D.), so OHRRPGCE and these Pokemon maps were the most noteworthy worldbuilding projects in my past. I’ll likely write more posts in the future about these projects and others.