Making a tolkien map toy

15th April 2023
I've been beavering away at a new Pico 8 project lately.
It started as a simple tweet cart, making a single nice looking mountain.



This went down quite well and I ended up making a new version with lots of little mountains.



...and some trees



I've also been a big fun of the classic fantasty map art style which is what originally inspired the look of the initial tweet cart and it I decided it was time to try making a little toy that would make these kinds of maps.

I started by creating a voronoi diagram



and started playing around with the numbers to make some nice shapes



Then I used the lines of the diagram to place the mountains and central points for forest locations



This evening I've been adding some coastlines



I'd be lying if I said I had a grand plan in mind for this toy. I think I'll keep adding little bits to it for as long as it keeps being fun to work on.

I'm posting quite regular updates for this on Twitter curently.
If you'd like to try the latest version of this out yourself, click here.

UPDATE: This has now been finished and released!
Come try it out for yourself!

also available on these other fine platforms
Pico 8 BBS
Itch.io

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