Once again, this is Kayla, but this time instead of a look at a faction I'm going to talk about how our work in progress hexmap developed. I've worked on hexcrawls before, for Transgender Deathmatch Legend and a third party supplement I did for Hieronymus, however hexes both work and look different in those two systems compared to Mausritter, so this was gonna have a bit of a learning curve.

I started out doing a rough, and very ugly, hand sketch just trying to place buildings, with the intention that this would be what I'd start to base the hexmap around. I did a couple of sketches where the spacing felt very off or unrealistic before I landed with this.

From here I started trying to build something in HexKit with some Creative Commons hex patterns. I was then placing logos in hexes for storefronts in Affinity. I found the amount of pavement looked weird to me, and made the stores look odd, and the logos fit awkwardly across shops of just two hexes.

I next tried making the stores bigger, and filling over the lines between the hexes. I didn't like this draft as I felt the finished stores looked ugly, and the size of them felt like it forced the street itself to be huger than was necessary while also not even that accurately encapsulating the size of a shop.

Side Note: You can see some names, logos and purposes of shops develop and flip around on each version of the map.

Having given multi-hex shops the old college try and not being satisfied with the look, I flipped to abstracting shops all with a single hex each and made this much cleaner looking version. This is the start of the map seen on the Kickstarter page, but currently the streets are very unpopulated.

I'd looked around for stock hex art that'd fit our modern city setting but didn't have much luck. Given I was already representing shops with logos rather than doors it felt a sensible enough jump to try out icons. I had an initial idea of having them be Maps-esque icons, which I do think was cute but forced icons to be unpractically small. I decided to white out the backgrounds as that felt it subtly had a similar effect. This version is almost exactly what's in our mock ups.

The main change was recolouring the black to a navy to match our body font. There'll be further changes after the end of the campaign as we work with Titanic backers to add locations to the game. I also will need to add some more locations to facilitate all the sticker sets we reach, based on our final stretch goal count.

So, essentially what I'm saying is you can still make a lasting impact on the map itself. How the map is at the start of a game at least, things don't always stick around on a high street for long after all, but that's a story for another day.