Autumn-clad goldenagers,

The last few weeks have been in the sign of the Circle Sea Grand Map. Yes, this is one of those updates that is weirdly technical.

The main part of Our Golden Age is traveling around a big, decaying world by plane (well, domesticated airwhale or blimper), train (the terrifying golem atom-train, perhaps), or automogolem (or bicycle, I guess). This part of the world, this Garden dominated by dreaming mechanical gods, is modern-ish and it needs maps that look the part.

My aim all along has been to replicate some of that vibe of a 1930s to 1970s National Geographic map, but the maps went through a number of permutations along the way.

Initially I thought I would do it all with vectors, making a map something like this:

I also experimented with a pixel art version.

Which looked ice, but drawing the symbols by hand wasn't really cutting it. Also, I really wanted those elevation effects.

The problem I had with this version was that the relief was really not quite doing what I wanted. By this time I was using Adobe Illustrator for the labels, Procreate for the painted terrain, and Adobe Photoshop for the relief. But Adobe Photoshop has removed lighting effects which allowed you to give the impression of relief from a greyscale layer.

So, as I came back to the map to finish all the lands ... I wanted to fix that hack. Instead of using an emboss on every layer, which made a huge, slow, and clumsy file, I wanted a proper lighting. And I found it. In Affinity Photo (well, Affinity Photo 2). So now we're up to four different apps for making this map.

Now, with that done, I needed some borders. And I already had the borders, right? Right. But they were in Adobe Illustrator, and even with gradient effects, they didn't quite cut it. They look too sharp for the slightly worn out NatGeo vibe I wanted.

Do you know how borders in maps used to be made? By hand. So I made the executive decision to ... remake them by hand. That took some time.

I think it was a worthwhile upgrade. I'm also slightly tweaking the colors of the labels, so they're not pure black, but have a hint of color, helping a bit with figuring out what they're for. Finally, you may notice that I've adjusted the symbols as I worked on the map. Initially, I made a map font, but it turned out to be too hard to make a multi-color font that would work with Illustrator, so it's just handmade symbols.

Some of the symbols, like the gates (above the SEZ), ports, etc. - still need to revise those. And make them smaller.

Now, why oh why did I need to do all this now?

This is why. This was my plan, to pack each of the lands in a spread like this. But I had planned without paying the piper.

I tried to layout the Blue Land, and it doesn't fit! Oh no! Also - my plan to just plop a jpg or png into indesign ... wouldn't play too nicely with the print, would it? No, it wouldn't. So ... I decided to export the labels as a PDF, which would preserve the pretty vectors and make the print file a bit sharper, while exporting the terrain as an image and sticking it beneath.

Oh, and how did I mask it? Handmade mask layers in the illustrator file. Trust me, this process is mad.

I now have every one of the six lands emphasised in layers for each of the six regional chapters, plus the map for the surrounding territories as I will require them and all the layers and everything else.

And some of the lands, some of them are big (the Red Land, I'm looking at you), so it's going to be a spread. But I don't want the reader to lose information in the middle, so it's two pages with overlapping art and labels.

That said, there is one more map layer I'm still planning to revise - the roads and transportation layer. I'm also going to do it by hand, and I need to test the visibility of roads and railways and sea routes to make sure it works properly with all the other stuff. The good thing is, because of how I've set up the files, I just have to export the terrain layers and the print file rebuilds itself semi-auto-magically.

I'm also going through the book (and the UVG) to try and make sure that most of the mentioned places also find themselves somewhere on the map. It's a task.

But, I hope, a task you appreciate:

Once the book and the board are done and laid out, I plan to share the source files for the map with all the backers, so you can make your own zoomed-in locations for games, or adapt it as you see fit.

That's it for this update. I thought I'd have more layout of the book done, but it was just cartography all the way down to the elephants and the turtles. Wild, wild stuff.

Now, I'm taking a two week holiday to visit family and friends in Europe after many years, so the next update will probably be in late October.

Take care and enjoy the Grand Map of the Circle Sea!

Luka,
of an Autumn Day,
Switzerland