Jakub's Fantasy Map World

Hello, and welcome to part two of the Youtubia project. In this post, I will be exploring the subject of the continent's provinces.  What are provinces? As described in part 1, the Youtubia landmass aims to put different content creators on a map as if they were cities, and so each of the continent's provinces are named after different topics that are covered on YouTube.  The Youtubia landmass is divided into 16 different provinces, which work in a similar fashion to real-life countries. Each province has a capital city (two in the case of the Arts Province), where the seat of the provincial government is located. The provinces are governed differently to each other, with different road signs, postcode systems, currencies and legal systems, as well as being located in separate time zones.  Below is a map of the provincial boundaries along with the locations of each of the provincial capitals, as well as the names of the oceans on which the coastlines of the provinces are ...

I would like to use this blog post to explore something that is slightly different to fantasy map creation, but still blends in nicely with the theme of this blog by providing a review of wellness-related products in the virtual gaming world. For those who are unfamiliar with the site, Slowroads.io is a web-based driving simulator made by Anslo that aims to provide a relaxing driving experience, and it uses some interesting software engineering quirks, such as using AI to generate a continuous set of landscapes. Slowroads offers two maps, the "Hills" map (which is fictional, but takes inspiration from the landscapes seen in the north of England) and the "Off World" map (based on Mars), however, for the purposes of this post, I will be using the "Hills" map to review the simulator since the user experience with both maps is fairly similar.  Upon accessing the landing page for the simulator, the one thing that I was fascinated about with respect to the look...

The beginnings of the project... It is a pleasure to announce a new personal project that I will be working on for the next couple of months, called the Youtubia project. The project will combine a mixture of general work on the landmass, as well as some city map designs for cities on the continent. In this post, I will be focusing on the general properties that will underpin the design choices for the landmass in general.  For the first few parts of this series, and for the design phases of city map projects, I will be hand-drawing the landmass features and street plans on a sketchbook, before moving on to the digital graphics design of the map.   So, where does Youtubia take its name? The name for the Youtubia continent takes its inspirations after I have been regularly watching YouTube content creators of varying subscriber sizes ( ahem the example about beauty and wellness content creators in the second blog post   ahem ), and I imagined to myself, what if these ...