Young Writers Society

So I spent today making a map of the suburbs where my story is going to take place. This is just the first part of it and as I get farther into the series I will expand the map. So here's the first version of it. I'd like to know what you guys think and how realistic you think it is. Bear in mind though, this story is taking place in my world for one of my other projects, but this story/map really isn't real. To put it basically, I'm pretty much writing a book inside of my book which would consequentially be a non-fiction place even though it's a fiction place since it's inside of my fiction world. But in that fiction world, the book is still fiction. So here's the map I'll stop rambling now:

Okay it would only let me upload it as cover art for some reason... So...LOOK ABOVE!

PS: Sorry It's small...

EDIT: YAY! I got it to upload as an attachment! All 11kb of it! And before I couldn't upload for some reason even though it was only 8kb. :/



Oh and sorry I forgot to mention before, the colors:

The brown and lighter brown are the ground/grass and trees, respectively. It's winter, plus the story's post-apocalyptic and it just in general looks better than a vibrant green(easier on the eyes that is). The black are important/city/government buildings and the grey is obviously the streets. The tan is notable barricade, ie a fence . Blue is water and the earthy brown around things is cliff/rocky area/steep hill.

As for the actual layout, the black near the bottom of the image is a church, the two blobs right in the middle(from left to right) are the elementary school and the middle school. No high school yet. That's gonna be a little farther out. The small black building above the middle school is the district offices and then the black blob a little ways above that is the police station. The county, Nakrainia, is quite militaristic and their army and military is almost indistinguishable. Hence it's largeness as a structure. The garage/barracks are above it cut off on this version of the map. Aka, the buildings bigger than what you see. I hope I covered everything background wise.

EDIT 2: The school and the surrounding area are going to be up for some "renovations." I'm not too happy at the moment with the school. I'll edit later when things are ready and updated.

I honestly have no idea what you just said, but it sounds cool Did you make the whole thing from scratch on paint or something like it? Too bad it's so small though, but I can make out what looks like a lake to the east, and a river running through the west side. If the little grey block things inside the brown are houses, I think they're a bit too crowded. It looks more like a kind of urban setting rather than a suburban one, being so grid-like and congested. That said, for the purpose of a story I think it's fine. It doesn't look "un-realistic," and this might be better for a story anyways. Good job. I would like to see a blown-up version though

Hey there, Shadowknight. Wow, this really is quite interesting. Mostly because I don't think I've ever seen anyone create a map of their setting in a story. It's really quite creative, so nice work! One thing I do have to be honest about is that when I first saw this I was completely and utterly baffled as to what everything was. I could see that it resembled a map of sorts, I just wasn't too sure about the colors or anything. Then you so kindly explained in the continuing paragraph, which was great. Afterwards I felt so much more clued in!

I think what would make this better is adding an actual key somewhere, even if you don't choose to attach it to the map itself. I mean, your way of explaining what everything was was all rather interesting and all, somewhat entertaining even by the way you nonchalantly referred to everything as blob, but I think that if you inserted a color coated key things might seem a little bit more easy to comprehend at first glance.

As for creativity, I give this two thumbs up. I honestly think it'd be cool to see other members on the site adding fun little things like this onto their novels to make them more interactive. ^-^ Maybe not something exactly like this, but along the lines of it. Also, what'd you use to draw it? Seems like a pretty basic sort of computer program, like what they use in classrooms at school and whatnot. Adobe has some really great computer software though to create stuff like this and allow it to come off looking so much cleaner. But anyway, this is just me being chatty now. Really cool idea you have.

-Smylin'

Often I think a lot of authors want to do this kind of things but either don't have the means to do it, or its limitations placed by the publisher and society's general perceptions of childish. As for the means part, you could probably make this in paint if you wanted, but the zoom is quite limiting. I used the GIMP. Free, open source and under the GNU GPL. As far as I know the licensing doesn't cover product/output/product output(:P), so I can pretty much do whatever I wish with my picture. Whereas now with Adobe you need licensing... so... pardon my rambling. I'm not sure whether I want to or not yet, but originally I did plan on adding a lot more as far as detail. The image you see as the cover art is the original aside from the stretching done by YWS formatting it to cover art size. I worked pixel by pixel, each house being 2x2 pixels. The larger image has been blown up a bit(ostensibly XD). As in I could add a lot more details and such. Working pixel by pixel was probably the best plausible solution for an area just this large. It already took me like 4/6 hours ish...lol. But now though, I could definitely add in a lot more detail now that I've blown things up. But by chapter 2 of my story or whatever I end up calling it, I'll hopefully be able to make up my mind. But the reason I think I'm not doing anything yet is for some reasons I have. But I will not yet speak of them...mainly because I'm not 100% sure how to say it! XD Well, I'm rambling too, okay I'm down now, except for my signature. I think. <<-- And that and this.

--Skis

Four to six hours? This would take me days, if not weeks to make. I would have no patience and everytime I messed up, I would scream in frustration. This map is really something I would like to do and is actually a nice piece of pixel art. I just want to stare at it for hours. I'll admit, even for a post-apocolyptic world, this map is a bit drap. Could you perhaps add another color or two?

Having something like this in a story would definitely be helpful. Perhaps after every chapter, you could display the map and have a little yellow arrow tracing their path of movement/action of that chapter. Gasp, that would be amazing! I totally need to do something like that now. Thank you for inspiration and good luck with what you have planned.

And yes, a key would be helpful.