[HN Gopher] Dungeon Scrawl: Old school maps in minutes
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Dungeon Scrawl: Old school maps in minutes
Author : Caseee
Score : 240 points
Date : 2020-06-23 14:04 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (dungeonscrawl.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (dungeonscrawl.com)
| andretti1977 wrote:
| I started using inkarnate [0] a few weeks ago. You can use the
| parchment style to have maps with old looking style.
|
| People use it both for world/regional maps and for town but also
| scene maps [1]
|
| [0] https://inkarnate.com/
|
| [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/inkarnate/
| grawprog wrote:
| It looks pretty awesome from the bit I could play with it. It
| would be nice if it worked properly on mobile also. Just being
| able to hide the tool bars and pan without the keyboard would
| help a lot.
| ajuc wrote:
| Looks great. Making maps is the worst part of being DM for me and
| playing on computer sets high standards for map quality so I end
| up spending 90% of prep time drawing maps :/
|
| I've made a quick and dirty generator of outdoors maps for my hex
| crawler campaign, maybe someone will find it useful:
| https://ajuc.github.io/outdoorsBattlemapGenerator/
|
| It has export to FoundryVTT (.dd2vtt format), I find it so much
| better than roll20.
| jjice wrote:
| My dad has always talked about how much he loved having to draw
| his own maps for games like Labyrinth [0] and Asylum [1]. He just
| recently played Breath of the Wild and while he loved it, he
| mentioned how cool it would be to have to draw the map there.
|
| I love the spirit in this, great job!
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labyrinth_(1980_video_game) [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asylum_(1981_video_game)
| aidenn0 wrote:
| If your dad hasn't played them yet, check out these games;
| aside from the lack of feelies, it's as close as you'll get to
| old-school games:
|
| http://excelsior-rpg.com/default.htm
| e12e wrote:
| I always liked Richard Bartle's take on this from a game design
| perspective, in his:
|
| "HEARTS, CLUBS, DIAMONDS, SPADES: PLAYERS WHO SUIT Muds"
| http://mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm
|
| Essentially: exploring is one dimension of fun, and some people
| enjoy it even more when it's hard (ie:no automap).
|
| I remember playing Eye of the Beholder with a friend, one of us
| on map duty, the other controlling the game...
| scott_s wrote:
| Your dad may enjoy the Etrian Odyssey series
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etrian_Odyssey) for the DS and
| 3DS where a big part of the game is you drawing the map on the
| bottom screen as you explore the dungeon.
|
| Review of the latest game for 3DS:
| https://www.polygon.com/2017/10/17/16492092/etrian-odyssey-5...
| bdefore wrote:
| Could use a link to jump into an existing example map.
| woah wrote:
| Panning does not work in safari
| nickthegreek wrote:
| Gave it a spin. UI is pretty clean, good landing page and neat
| that it can do isometric as well. Love the path tool. Wish there
| were dedicated Undo/Redo buttons in the top bar. Only bug I found
| was that if you use the menu item to 'rough it up', ctrl+z undoes
| the rough up and the last item you created.
| taormina wrote:
| As someone who has been moved his DnD sessions to Discord with
| COVID going on, and has made a "shareable map" out of Google
| Sheets, this looks fantastic!
| SweetLlamaMyth wrote:
| My table has made great use of https://shmeppy.com for remote-
| play maps. The maps it makes are much less sophisticated (just
| painting color on the squares and lines of a grid). What it
| gives you instead are player/monster tokens that everyone can
| see, measuring tools, and "laser pointers" to allow
| participants to draw attention to a region of the map while
| speaking.
|
| EDIT: also an awesome fog of war feature; how could I forget?
| scott_s wrote:
| Is the Escher-esque image under "Isometric Edit Mode"
| (https://dungeonscrawl.com/images/pic10.png) a joke, or does the
| tool allow for physically impossible layouts? Or am I reading the
| image wrong and it's a physical layout?
| probabletrain wrote:
| The tool allows for that, but it takes some effort and
| familiarity to actually do - the isometric mode just does a
| rotate and squeeze scale
| cthalupa wrote:
| > does the tool allow for physically impossible layouts?
|
| I hope so! I've definitely run some dungeons that had Escher-
| esque layouts. It's for D&D dungeons, not real life
| architecture :)
| drdeadringer wrote:
| This reminds me of the Dr Who episode "Castrovalva"; the Doctor
| and his companions do spend some time running around trying to
| figure out the layout until they realize what's going on.
|
| I've entertained the idea of DMing that type of thing for a
| while now.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| Q1, Queen of the Demonweb Pits, had something similar if I
| recall.
| simonh wrote:
| There was an article in Dragon magazine back on the 80s
| about hypercube dungeon layouts.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| Even further back, there's Hunt the Wumpus, which I think
| was originally laid out on a Platonic solid. Messing with
| adventurers is a time-honored tradition!
| aidenn0 wrote:
| AFACT it's just a line drawing tool that supports isometric
| drawing.
|
| One of the defining features of isometric is that such layouts
| are possible because the X/Y axes are identically sized (iso =
| same; metric= measurement) regardless of the position on the Z
| axis.
| gentleman11 wrote:
| I can't really tell what this is. Is it just a drawing tool that
| applies styles, or does it procedurally generate dungeons for
| you? If it doesn't procedurally generate, it would probably still
| be more fun to just use graph paper and some coloured pens
| citizenkeen wrote:
| Fun? Maybe. But this is so much faster. And as a GM, sometimes
| I'm just coming up with maps fifteen minutes before I sit down
| to play. This is a really solid tool for when I don't have time
| for Dungeondraft, and I find Dungeondraft to be even more fun
| than graph paper.
| BorisTheBrave wrote:
| It just draws things.
|
| This one generates dungeons:
|
| https://watabou.itch.io/one-page-dungeon
| scottoreily wrote:
| https://dungeondraft.net/
| mosselman wrote:
| Wow this is very impressive. I wasn't expecting the lighting
| stuff and was amazed.
| greenhatglack wrote:
| Any chance of splicing each grid as a unique PNG and building it
| up in JSON like Tiled when exporting?
| ArtDev wrote:
| This tool is awesome and perfect timing because I am writing an
| adventure for my daughter and her friend to play :)
| richard_mcp wrote:
| The "old school" style they're advertising is mostly based off of
| Dyson Logo's maps. I think it's interesting that this seem to
| come out after Dyson started teasing a similar program for his
| Patreon subscribers. On one hand, it's a great looking piece of
| software, but it feels a little scummy to write software that
| heavily leans on Dyson's style and then directly compete with
| him.
| e12e wrote:
| Is this somehow distinctive from Dragon Magazine / Dungeon
| Magazine from the late 80s in a way I'm not seeing? Or eg. the
| various TSR boxed settings with dungeons?
| nickthegreek wrote:
| Dungeonscrawl is definitely inspired by Dyson.
|
| Here are some tweets by the maker:
|
| https://twitter.com/probabletrain/status/1259172635776294912.
| .. https://twitter.com/probabletrain/status/12588210409370132
| 48...
| richard_mcp wrote:
| I never read those magazines and I can't say I'm an expert on
| dungeon map styles, but it's the hatching done in the dungeon
| walls that Dyson is known for (e.g.,
| https://dysonlogos.blog/2011/09/03/dungeon-doodles-a-
| crossha...).
|
| It looks like the person that made this program started
| playing around with the idea May 9 (https://twitter.com/proba
| bletrain/status/1259172635776294912) a day after Dyson
| started tweeting about his program
| (https://twitter.com/DysonLogos/status/1258797586464542723).
|
| I think Dyson's program is just a Photoshop extension and
| Dungeon Scrawl looks way more powerful, but it's worth
| pointing out the very similar timelines and styles.
| BorisTheBrave wrote:
| Here's someone playing with the concept even earlier
| though. It did the rounds on reddit at the time, so I'd
| assumed it was the inspiration.
|
| https://twitter.com/watawatabou/status/1197194111171940352
|
| (in aother tweet, @watawatabou attributes the style to
| Dyson, though the idea of doing it programatically).
| kemayo wrote:
| That cross-hatching-in-the-walls thing is fairly distinct,
| and I saw it immediately on Dyson's blog but not on a quick
| survey of old Dragon/Dungeon maps. That said, Dyson is
| clearly _going_ for that aesthetic mostly, so it could be
| convergent evolution, and I 'm hardly up to date on current
| styles for maps in other places.
| pharke wrote:
| Just taking a look at Dungeon Magazine on archive.org and
| it seems that crosshatching in walls is pretty common, at
| least in the early editions.
|
| https://archive.org/details/Dungeon_Magazine_002/page/n25/m
| o...
|
| https://archive.org/details/Dungeon_Magazine_002/page/n45/m
| o...
|
| https://archive.org/details/Dungeon_Magazine_002/page/n51/m
| o...
|
| https://archive.org/details/Dungeon_Magazine_003/page/n31/m
| o...
|
| https://archive.org/details/Dungeon_Magazine_003/page/n41/m
| o...
| lakkal wrote:
| The style really reminds me of old Chaosium maps, from the
| 1980s.
| wishinghand wrote:
| Dyson's tool (which is more like an art asset) is pretty much
| Photoshop only, which is prohibitive to some. I signed up for
| their Patreon when they first previewed it, thinking I could
| use it with Affinity Photo. There's some layer combination
| features missing that means it's PS only.
| probabletrain wrote:
| Actually, development started before Dyson's Photoshop product,
| and sure it leans on his style, but the hatching existed before
| and was popularised by him. It's a common style across many
| existing dungeon mapping tools, and just one of the styles
| offered by the tool.
| richard_mcp wrote:
| I'm glad to hear that! The style is very popular in the drawn
| maps I've seen. I haven't been interested in maps for long
| and don't pay too much attention to digital map programs. I
| associate the style with Dyson, as that what I've heard other
| people do. I first saw you tweeting about the program after I
| saw Dyson's tweet and the Dungeon Scrawl site says the
| development began on May 8th, which is why I thought the
| timeline looked a little suspect. I'm happy to hear that's
| not the case.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| FWIW, I just pulled open my red-box era OD&D books and the
| maps are all hatched in various styles when underground,
| but stippled (kind of a grassy texture) to indicate
| exterior; so e.g. a for a keep in the side of a mountain it
| would be clear which walls abut solid matter and which are
| stone.
|
| The maps in the basic set use circles rather than lines for
| the hatching though.
| sbarre wrote:
| I was hand-drawing cross-hatched style maps on graph paper
| in the early 90s when I was a teenager running my own
| campaigns, and I certainly don't claim to have invented it
| either..
|
| Mine didn't look quite so good though. ;-)
| e12e wrote:
| Yeah, this was kind of my mindset, too. Hatching is
| certainly an old trick, and I see the "Dyson hatch" is
| somewhat distinctive - but for me, knowing "old school"
| maps, it didn't stand out from the other offered styles -
| and certainly lived up to the promise of "old school"
| look and feel :)
| woah wrote:
| This is a very common hatching style that I have seen countless
| times.
| hunterloftis wrote:
| I love the style of this and tried something similar before
| changing direction with Table of Sending.
|
| After lots of testing, I settled on 2.5D tiles for the DMs who
| wanted to sketch their maps 15 minutes before playtime:
|
| - https://tableofsending.com/
|
| The shadowcasting fog-of-war has also been awesome since the map
| is semantically understandable:
|
| - https://twitter.com/HunterLoftis/status/1269396682233581568
| rgovostes wrote:
| I've been kicking around an idea that would also require a
| similar sort of browser-based drawing tool. Is there a good
| library for building these, or do I start with a blank <canvas>?
| azhenley wrote:
| There are a lot of graphics libraries out there, but I've been
| using PixiJS.
|
| https://www.pixijs.com/
| gentleman11 wrote:
| Threesj with socket.io for collaboration
| vertexmachina wrote:
| I'm currently playing through the old Zelda games that don't
| provide an in-game map. This looks like it could be useful.
| mhd wrote:
| I've played around it a bit since someone recommended it a few
| days ago. Great for coarse dungeon layouts, but would probably
| need some more detail-oriented "finishing" if I'd want to use it
| for VTT play. Once we're going back to real dice, this might come
| in handy, if I'm ever doing a dungeon-heavy campaign.
|
| Until then, I have to cope with the oddities of running
| DungeonDraft with Wine.
| mey wrote:
| Yeah once we go back to an actual table (2021?) this will be
| amazing. I can see using this to sketch out a dungeon before
| breaking down into smaller maps in DungeonDraft for VTT.
| xwdv wrote:
| I would like to see a randomize button that creates something
| random and then lets me edit it to my tastes. It's just so
| exhausting to plan an entire dungeon from scratch.
| johnzim wrote:
| One thing I found fun was to start by blocking out one room,
| then another and another and basically switching between tools
| - the geometric shape too for a tower or two, and then start
| linking them up.
|
| After a little bit of noodling you start to feel the outline of
| a building and then you can be a little more deliberative.
|
| In my experience, the hard part about planning out a dungeon is
| filling it with encounters.
|
| There's another creator (Donjon) which doesn't make maps as
| prettily or easily as this one but it does allow you to
| basically do what you're looking for:
|
| https://donjon.bin.sh/d20/dungeon/
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(page generated 2020-06-23 23:00 UTC)