I spent yesterday mapping with my isometric graphing paper that my lovely girlfriend bought me for Christmas (you’ll see why I had the pad out on Tuesday when I post the map I was working on yesterday). But in the process I drank a lot of caffeine.

Which is rough, because I pretty much cut caffeine out of my diet recently. So as night arrived, I still had the pad in front of me, and a pencil… and too much energy.

So this started to happen. Just a random collection of lines and buildings in a strictly isometric perspective, without thought as to gameability or whether it would turn into a functional map or just… something else.

And it started to grow… Sometime around 1:30 this morning I realized I had filled the page with pencil scribblings (and spent a fair chunk of time erasing and redrawing sections to prevent accidental M.C. Escher twists) and it really was time for bed.

A full letter-sized page of madness. Some strange city where law and chaos have collided into an explosion of straight lines, sharp angles, and bizarre byways.

This morning I started to ink the final piece from last night (using a Sakura Micron 03 pen) and it rapidly grew more… solid. Less sketchy… Like a solid heavy thing slowly emerging from the potential of the grid and penciled lines.

A quick hit with the eraser later, scan the mofo into Photoshop and a bit of digital editing to make it a little more apparent as to what is what and we finally get The House of Seven Larks.

If you manage to use this in a game, I would LOVE to hear about it!