Return to Tourmaline (Patreon)

but, going back through previous sketches, i figure this is the logical first stop. unlike the past ones, this one was never drawn up digitally since it was just for my personal use-- so it's pretty messy. like the past ones, ctrl+scroll is your friend.

bop. 

dont mind the folds and water stains... it was sitting on my desk for quite a while.
so it's harder to navigate through this one-- i'll translate:

so, the whole thing is a rectangle, and the first thing you might notice is that it's also divied up into a lot of smaller rectangles. this is how the area was originally going to be broken down into smaller maps before i realized that that would cause approximately way too much lag.

the numbers in ink on the sides are the dimensions in tiles of each map. the whole thing over all is 500x300 which those of you who were around this time last year might remember was the size of the area i originally mapped it in before splitting it up. 

so, originally, tourmaline was going to be wayy bigger. if you can believe it. but it wouldn't have been that much work to map becaauuuuse what i was gonna do was have that halfway point-- it's marked on there with the text on the right side, reads "no man's land between these two". the idea was i'd have the bottom and top halves of the desert but between them would be a tiling segment of the desert that could be repeated a number of times in order to make the player feel more lost in it-- like i swear it wasn't this far to walk the first time, etc-- or just make it seem that much more distant and out there. that probably seems like overkill now-- and it may have been. i think i underestimated how much 500 tiles would be for a player.
or a mapper.
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that was eventually cut anyway due to lag restrictions. because having that many smaller maps in an open space meant having that many more events-- the original reason to cut it into small maps was to avoid lag but it would have the opposite effect. so without those teleport events, looping area doesn't work.
i guess i re-used the concept for titania's gym though. so that's fine.

so i had to find a different solution and that different solution is what the highlighted line you see is. i looked for a different way to divide it and i realized that if i used the front of the scrapyard as a barrier and squeeze in the cliffs there then it would actually really tank the number of events i'd have to use. you've seen how that panned out.

in the end the segments that were preserved were just the maps to the left and right of the scrapyard, and even those are less divide than as marked here. 

other changes you can see would be that there are only two oases marked on here (with the @ ), meaning it's probably before i decided what mirage tower's mechanism would be. sugiline is a bit further south than in game, and there are two pillars marked down by the city shadow. i'm not really sure why i did that but i'm sure it had to do something with this part of the drawn map:

the pillar in the southwest in-game is meant to be the one that goes over the rail there. probably i was originally going to get around this in game by turning the left part of the wall obscured behind the bridge into a second pillar, but the whole deal was very awkward so in the end i kept it to a minimum. 

the desert in game is also a bit wider on the south end than in this sketch.,, is what i was going to say but that's not right at all. actually it matches to the number since i marked it down at the bottom there. what's wider is the part that curves outwards to the right on the map. in-game it's much more straight and narrow, especially with the mountain behind sugliline cave. that whole corner of the desert not being a thing was supposed to be because it's the backside of ametrine mountain and friends, and i suppose the width hasn't changed that, so it's fine.

and... of course, the scrapyard is already fully shaped out too. i think that was also done according to the drawn map. but next time i'll post the sketch plan for that area.

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in the mean time i've started mapping E`18's first area. per what we discussed before, i'll be tagging posts that would be a minor spoiler for the new episode in development with [E18] ... so... even though probably most of the things i'll post from now until then will have to do with the episode, that tag is the one you might want to watch out for.