Cordillera AMA Supplement

[Repth]

Hello All,

In anticipation of the upcoming Cordillera AMA (held on Discord, please join our Discord Server for additional details), I thought it would be nice to share some of the design steps behind the plane. This is mostly copied and pasted from Dev forums documenting the process. I also added two layered screenshots at the end - one is the dome layered on the wilderness and the other is Centrum layered onto the wilderness underground. Keen eyes will see misplaced powerplants - relics of inaccessible powerplants used to create 'self-powered' buildings.

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The format for this is me rambling on about my mapmaking process for Cordillera. I am reviewing old documentation and images and sticking things here. Grab a cuppa and enjoy. This story begins in 2015, so I'm glossing over a lot and really trying to hone in on the mapmaking process itself, because I have screenshots, and plain IRC dumps are boring.

C1.jpg (293.39 KiB) Viewed 548 times

Here is the first iteration of Cordillera. My background is in environmental science, so I started with the landscape and the area the dome occupies on the planet. Early thoughts were for the center of the dome to be 0,0, but it felt like a gimmick with little practical application. The dome theme actually started out as an underwater world at the bottom of a shallow sea, where low tide would be day because light from the surface got through the water, and high tide was night because of the enveloping darkness. I still like the idea, but the narrative just drifted away from that and towards that of a dome on an alien planet. As you can see from the above image, that included wetland and upland components in the wilderness from the beginning. As an environmental scientist by trade, I spent a lot of time studying and mapping wetlands (and the civil engineering/development process in general). It's something I have intimate knowledge of, so I wanted to lean on that.

You'll also notice here that Great Plains is different. Originally, I was going to have it be incomplete - partially open to the wilderness. I never landed on a way of executing that that felt right, because I always thought of it as a way to access the wilderness, and dumping people anywhere but North of Great Plains felt wrong. So I ended up closing the dome up more to control that movement pattern.

C2.jpg (98.58 KiB) Viewed 548 times

Just a thought on how to do the lake so it's not just a circle and has a little more presence on the dome map..

Few other thoughts; Crib dome would be NE, as shown on my previous map, so if noobs walk out of it, they hit the lake if they keep going straight, forcing them to go to E or N dome sections. Teleporters should probably be located in the center of each of N, E, S, W section near the outer concentric circles (about 17 tiles away from 0,0). Both the N and E teleporters are linked to a teleporter in the Crib dome.

The above text accompanies the first image of the lake above. Believe it or not, I actually had to remake Cordillera a few times, as we were flip-flopping between servers or something, it's all so vague now. I think this image was from the Ruby Alpha.

Crib dome - My initial hope for Port Hope was that everyone under a certain level, say 3, would spawn there. I wanted this in place of a tutorial plane or anything like that. The new player experience is something I care about and I thought it would be an improvement for new characters to spawn near one another, wandering out if that was their choice. The idea to actually close Port Hope at the beginning of the breath came later. I did always want people who wandered SW from Port Hope to have to pick a fork in the road - that ended up being following the Quickway into the Choral Forest or going south into Belmont Court. You could get to Outer Centrum from there, too, in the end, but I doubted that would be a move many took. Ultimately also decided to only link the Belmont Court transporter to Port Hope, giving the Choral Forest more of a country feel. Looking back, I'm not sure Centrum was a spaceship buried under Cordillera yet at this point. I feel like that came later, though the 'transporter hub' idea was always there. Anyway, bit of a ramble, since as we all know, Port Hope was closed and opened later on. There were concerns players would take knowing where low levels spawn to their advantage - makes sense.

C3.jpg (264.49 KiB) Viewed 548 times

I had the rough shape of things here at this point, almost had my canvas. See the building just outside the Port Hope dome? My original intent was for you to be able to actually see what's beyond the dome, knowing you'd be able to get there someday/somehow. Ultimately, this proved a bit too complicated/restrictive and I didn't jump for it. Losing a map may have had something to do with it - again, Ruby Alpha. I have the power stations here, but I didn't like the perfect mirroring there - power stations developed alongside those neighborhoods, so they ended up where they were convenient to build for planning purposes, it didn't need to be a perfect mirror. I gave myself the rule that a power station needed to be adjacent or diagonal from the corresponding stairwell in Outer Centrum. Things ended up lightly mirror but that felt more organic.

C4.jpg (225.63 KiB) Viewed 548 times

Same thing, but with my "districts" in each area.

East is the university/higher education area. This means a uni or two, dormitories, and a business sector geared to that demographic. Geographically, this is closer to mountains found outside the dome, so there may be some mountain tiles or rolling hills etc. in this quarter.

The Southern quarter will be more of a traditional 'downtown'. This or W may be where we see a lot of "genetic haberdashery" type things. Geographically, it's going to be closer to the wetlands outside the dome, so there may be more ponds and small lakes in this quarter.

The Western quarter will be more industrial, housing indoor food operations like aquaculture centers, hydroponic grow operations, and other factory type buildings as well as 'big box' stores in the business sector. This or S may be where we see a lot of "genetic haberdashery" type things. Geographically, this side will be near more of a prairie ecosystem, so there may or may not be major environmental tiles, although we can throw in some ponds/lakes on the side closer to the southern quarter.

The Northern quarter may have things like a botanical garden near the lake and a forestry operation area as well as a preserve, etc.

C5.jpg (562.95 KiB) Viewed 548 times

I picked representative tiles of different colors to "stamp" my districts in and do some polishing. Minglewood ended up losing that "facilities" feeling, as it ended up detracting from the feel I wanted there. When things started shaping up, it felt even more wrong to have what's now the Great Plains dome as 'unfinished'. For the wilderness, looking for that canvas again, I put mountains everywhere and carved a river through, just to start layering various landscape elements on top of one another. The S and W quadrants had a pond and mountain each, respectively, to remind me of the landscape beyond the dome that I wanted lightly reflected in those quadrants.

C6.jpg (128.94 KiB) Viewed 548 times

The map saw significant progress made to the wilderness. This was important because I wanted the Southern and Eastern quadrants to retain some of the geographic characteristics of the wilderness outside the dome. So you see mountains to the East and ponds/lakes to the South, both inside and outside the dome. I was starting my way from the upland and working down into the wetland, which is why the wetland still looks like a large sea. I think this was all still in Ruby Alpha, so I ended up losing all of it and had to start over.

C7.jpg (238.8 KiB) Viewed 548 times

Yes, I was remaking it again, but at this point, I had a good idea of what I was after and even got started on layering on the Quickway. Note the wilderness is gone - it was not to be married to the dome plane again. Great Plains ended up taking a back seat while I reconstructed things. I don't remember how far along I got before finally turning my attention to where the break in the wall is for it.

I remember leaving Centrum for last, and having a bit of a difficult time striking the balance I wanted there. When I decided to do the massive warehouses everywhere except the SW to keep it from being super symmetrical, things just fell into place. N, E, S, and W Centrum somewhat reflect those quadrants in Cordillera.

There's a lot this didn't cover, obviously, like putting down specific tiles. I just didn't take screenshots of that part. My process overall was from the top down, so by the time I got to placing actual tiles, I was taking less screenshots. Life also got pretty busy at that time and I disappeared here and there.

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Cordillera and Wilderness.png (434.71 KiB) Viewed 548 times

Centrum and Underground.png (190.92 KiB) Viewed 548 times

Keen eyes will also note that the mountains on the surface align with the character-visible bedrock tiles in the underground with ONE exception.