Hi. Hopefully this is the right place to post this. I'm developing a WWII strategy game, and I'm considering drawing my own maps for some of the battles the game will cover. This is similar to what I want, but it has a bit too much topographical information. The reason for drawing my own maps is two-fold: I can include only the terrain features that are important in my game, and I don't need to worry about copyright at all. I'm not much of an artist, but I am familiar with applications like paint.net and Gimp. Does anyone have any advice on how to start, or some tips on how to make maps that look authentic?
Simplest way would be to get royalty-free maps and change the identifications and place names. The West Point Atlas of WWII is not copyrighted. Department of History - WWII European Theater
What is the exact purpose of the map you plan to draw? Who would use it? Is it for historic background- the general setting for a war game, or to add a sense of period, or will your players need to use the map for navigation or resource planning? What scale do you want to use? Are you after tactical or strategic maps? A lot of of WW2 mapping is now out of copyright. However most of these have a lot more detail than you could use. Many were originally used as big wall maps containing a lot more data than you could fit electronically. If you are after generic maps of political or physical geography, there are some copyright free maps. wikipedia can be a friend here.
This looks like an excellent place to get started. Thanks! Excellent questions! I'll be posting an in-depth video on the concept soon, but the map will be the center of the game. The basic idea is that you're a general sitting in a tent, and all you have in front of you is a radio, some markers and some little unit miniatures. Win the battle. I most likely will need custom maps, as I only want to include pertinent information, and the maps will need to look nice. Will have to see if modifying historical maps will be enough. The maps will definitely be more strategic, but the scale may be like but a bit smaller: Of course, as I make the game, the scale may change depending on testers find fun. Good point on most maps being copyright-free by now.
Anything done at the taxpayers' expense should be in the public domain. It's possible to find things that are otherwise but they wouldn't relate to your mission.
I found excel quite useful. Plot the locations as x and y co-ordinates and you can project an x,y scatter diagram as a base map, with the locations you need to that particular map.
Interesting idea of using a scatter plot or a graph as the base of a map. I'm familiar with R (a programming language) and that might be even more powerful for this.
You can cheat a bit and use Google Earth for some of the images. You'll be deleting some "modern" but for small unit actions finding the type of area shouldn't be too hard.
