I've been putting time into designing the world map recently and oh boy is it frustrating. The world has to both make sense while having a nice spread of different climates/etc to not feel like every area is the same, which is forcing my hand in how certain parts are designed.

The original world map design that I made back when the game was still called Rise of Deus (in 2016!) can be found below. It's not a masterpiece and wasn't supposed to be, just a quick mock-up of how the world would look. There's some serious issues with it though...

...most notably, the lack of different themes. 90% of the map uses the same grassy theme, which is boring to look at and lacks variety. An interesting thing to note is that in this early mock-up there are almost no trees at all.

Moving on to V2 of the mock-up, which is a combination of the old idea with variety and what I had already made at the time. In this version the secret hidden snow island got a promotion to being plot-relevant:

By the way, the mock-up shown here is already outdated. The current version of the world map is based heavily on the V2 mock-up, but is changed around a bit because it still lacked variety in the editor. Making the world visually interesting while also believable is difficult. That's actually why I moved the snow island to the top. It was originally in the place of the desert island on the right side, but I realised that it didn't really make sense that an entirely snowy island would be situated on the same horizontal plane as a grassy/desert one.

It made more sense to me to shift it up so that it was up north to explain why it was cold. That said, having it at the top of the map is now causing issues with gameplay so I might have to shift it back to the right again...

Another issue I'm currently having is the two port towns. They are intended to be used as a sort of fast travel system, but the world map isn't really big enough to necessitate the need to travel across that small section of the world. I might have to move the lower port to the lower island to actually make it useful, but that means redesigning the entire connecting part of the ocean and redesigning the pathways between the towns. It's a constant series of trade-offs while trying to design for both gameplay and logic.

Once I have the world layout finalised, I'll be able to start working on the towns and different side areas which should fill in some of the empty spaces. These will pose challenges of their own to design though...

Oh yeah, something else worth noting about the world map is that in the original mock-up there were 9 towns, while in the newer version there are only 7. This is simply because designing towns takes ages and is dull, if I can cut corners for my own sanity then I will. Speaking of cutting corners, I've decided to combine two of the towns to give the ship system an actual use like I mentioned. This means that there are only 6 towns now, but less is more.

Seeing as I've been talking about the world map a bunch, here's how it currently looks in-engine (keep in mind that I'm mostly adjusting the layout at the minute, visuals aren't a priority at the moment):

My main goal is to give the map some variety and to break up the completely straight roads. I don't want the player to feel as though they're running down a completely straight path because they have no other choice, but at the same time having too many twists makes it frustrating to navigate. Basically, it's a huge balancing act just like everything else.