The map works (on our machines)

How we tore down our first map and built Northvale from scratch.

Confession time: this isn't the first map. There was another one.

Back in the Unreal Engine 4 days, we built a town and a farm on the south end of a map, and honestly, they were pretty good. There were streets, fences, a barn with the right amount of creepiness, and the whole thing had a lived-in feel.

Then we stepped back, squinted at the overhead view, and realized something uncomfortable: we had basically rebuilt a map we loved from another game, almost street for street. It's a love letter, sure, but love letters aren't supposed to be photocopies.

So we did the reasonable thing. We tore it down.

Welcome to Northvale

Northvale is a mountain valley in the present day. It isn't a futuristic wasteland or a military zone, just a small mountain community that used to put "Your home away from home" on its welcome sign. That sign is still standing. The optimism isn't.

The main town is Dunhaven: a Main Street, a diner, and a water tower you'll eventually use to figure out where you are. Head toward the water and you'll reach the Cove, with beaches, docks and a few boats nobody took. Around all of it are the mountains, which look lovely and are mostly there to remind you that nobody's driving out of here.

How you build a valley from nothing

1. Draw it badly first. Every great map starts as an ugly one. Ours started as grey blocks and flat ground, and you could fall off the edge of the world if you walked far enough. (That bug was kept for a while for morale.)
2. Decide where people will fight. In a base-building survival game, the map isn't scenery. It's real estate. Every hilltop, valley and treeline is a question: can you build here, and can someone take it from you? Good spots should be worth arguing over.
3. Give the town a reason to exist. Real towns grow where they do for reasons: a road, the water, a pass through the mountains. Dunhaven sits where it does because that's where people would actually have built it. That makes it easier to find your way around without a map. It also makes it more unsettling when you realize everyone's gone.
4. Break it, then fix it, then break it again. The terrain sculpting, the roads, the foliage that grew through the floor of the diner. The map works, but only on our machines so far. The playtest will tell us exactly how it doesn't work on yours.

What's next

Polishing the programming and UI is next on the list, along with filling the empty parts of the valley with things worth finding and places worth defending. If you want to be one of the first people to get lost in Northvale, join our Discord. Bring a friend; it's harder to get lost with two. (It isn't. You'll both get lost... we made sure of it.)

See you in the valley.