Designing A Game Map

Using my own editor to efficiently create a viking themed map for my game

I am currently working on a game that requires a couple of different maps to play on. For interest’s sake I want to have different map themes with a few maps of each theme. At the moment there are four themes: Lush Mesa, Tropical Island, Desert and now Vikings. Having different themes doesn’t really matter for the gameplay itself, but it makes it more interesting and replayable for the player and also more fun for me to work on the maps. Lately I have really been enjoying making low poly models in Blender and having to create more models for different themes is a nice excuse and motivation to make more models.
While I would love to place every single tree and rock on the map myself, it’s not really feasible, because it would take forever. However, I have created my own editor, where I have a few tools to help me make a better map more efficiently. I am still adding new features to the editor, but even in it’s current state it’s very useful for creating my game maps.

Creating the map

The first aspect of every new map is the terrain. Currently I have an extra program to create heightmaps which I can then import into my editor, but I am going to integrate the heightmap creation directly into the editor for ease of use. Once I have a starting terrain from the heightmap it’s time to create the areas for the players. I went with a simple 30x30 square for this map, but they can be…