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This blog post will discuss the creation of the map that will be featured in Keeper’s Veil. The map, while not necessarily a mechanic, will help split up the narrative and add some world-building to the game. My goal was to emulate an old-timey, fantasy map without it looking like a pirate treasure map.
I decided to name the area ‘Nathair Veil Isles’ with ‘nathair’ being the Scottish Gaelic word for serpent and ‘veil’ meaning to conceal something. This is a subtle easter egg that hints towards the twist at the end of Keeper’s Veil. Another detail I added was that you can actually see the Fisherman’s family home; located on the west-east side of the bottom leftmost island. As described in the game, their home is visibly ‘poorer’ than the others (more a shack than a house) and is isolated from the rest of the village. You can also see the small beach that the Fisherman will mention, and if you look closely, there is also a headstone - which is revealed to belong to the dead Lightkeeper as revealed in Day 1 - Part 3.
As with every time I attempt digital art, my main issue was that I did not have the right brushes for the specific vision I had in mind. This primarily became a problem when it came to the ocean.
The main function of the map is for the player to loosely follow along with where the Fisherman is sailing, so therefore, it has to be ocean-heavy. It was easy to add details to the land sections, by creating mountains and rivers, but the ocean gave me great difficulty. At first, I wanted to add interest by creating a Bathymetric map - where the depth of water is shown with deepening shades of blue. Although, as I could not find a brush that gave the effect I wanted, it just turned out looking like odd blue blobs that created more of a cartoon look.
Instead, I opted for dashed lines around the islands and scattered throughout larger sections of the ocean that could indicate more shallow water.
Here is the final product! Overall I am pleased with how it turned out - I especially like the textures of the paper and creases.
The map featured in Keeper’s Veil.
We will soon implement this into our Unity project.