Introduction

Welcome! This blog will function as my diary/logbook as I go about developing a country from scratch on the fictional mapping platform OpenGeoFiction. Here is my country now:

It's currently called "Ajada" which was an earlier name that I've now decided to change. I'm going with Embla for now, and we'll see where things lead. To create a broad picture of the country, which is located between -47 and -52 degrees in latitude, imagine an inland mountain range straddling the border running NW to SE, with a few broad river valleys emptying into the gulf(?), and a scattering of islands in the far north and extending off the peninsula in the far south. Another post will go over geology, and yet another on climate. But for now I'm going with a temperate rainforest (see the Pacific Northwest for inspiration) with a vibrant coastline and lots of terrestrial resources like timber and fertile land. Not imagining much in the way of mineral or fossil fuel resources, but definitely thinking of adding some kind of port hub. Check back for next steps and progress! 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Revised Elevation Map

Image
I spent some more time playing around with the river systems and decided to shift things from the last draft. I'm not sure about the lake geography. I'm going to try to look for examples of other lakes to better refine the size. I definitely want some kind of large-ish lake in the middle, but there will be other finger lakes in the northern mountains, I haven't reached that level of detail yet. Next steps are tracing this map into JOSM to get a rough outline of rivers and some administrative boundaries. The dotted lines are what I envision as states/districts/region type things. The Northern district is the biggest but also likely the less populated. The middle two will probably have about even population, the capital city is in the middle district at the mouth of the largest river. I'm excited to design that area eventually. The southern two districts are much smaller. I'm not sure if having them split into two is justified unless there was another major city cente
Read more

River Refining + Mountain Range Design

Image
I'm continuing to build out my riparian system for Embla. I've also been working a lot on a Conlang/naming language, which has got me really excited about putting more things on the map! I was worried my previous rivers weren't at a realistic scale or pattern for the type of mountain range I had in mind. I have been looking on OpenTopo map for a lot of mountain range inspiration! Something I have found extremely helpful is to practice tracing real mountain ranges & river systems on Inkscape. Using the regular pencil tool, trace a rough line along the highest ridges of a small portion of a range. I color this red for contrast, then start in blue to color the rivers/streams. After doing this a couple times, it's given me a much better feel for how the rivers actually look in the type of range I want to create in west-central Embla. Here's what I have ended up with: The greyed out background is the currently uploaded river system. Blue is new rivers, red are
Read more