As those who follow our social media, its that time of the year again. What time? #ampvember time. Lauri tried to jumpstart the whole thing a month early, but here we are.

So, what is #mapvember. I guess I would relate it closely to NaNoWriMo or National Novel Writing Month, in which you try to write a whole novel in one month. Here we try to make a map every day of the month. Lauri has been doing his on the social media side, I’ll be doing mine a bit differently.

For more on #mapvember, you should visit its originator’s, Miska Fredman’s site. There you can see a challenge for each day and an deeper explanation of the whole thing.

What will I be doing instead? Well, last year I made a pretty simple dungeon generator, which tries to mimic somewhat natural dungeons. I like it. It sometimes makes weird maps, but if you are, say, a bandit lord and you need a hideout in a certain area, you’ll use what you can find. Like maybe one of these I made.

Part of the idea is that I wanted to do something different. Something I’ve never done before. Maybe no-one has done before, because the whole thing rests on a pretty out-there idea. So, I’ll try to do the same this year. Something different. Something I can find creative solutions for.

I won’t be making 30 maps in 30 days, but rather at the end of the 30 day period, I will have millions of potential maps. Actually much more than millions, because it solely depends on the ceiling of the system the software is run on. Usually its going to be 2^32 or 2^64. Enough anyway, because even the smaller of these numbers is over four billion.

Not that most of them will be as useful as most of the human-drawn maps, but hey, I bet there’s more than 30 good ones in there somewhere and you can also use my work as a basis for your own designs.

My theme for this year is going to be village grown around a roadside inn. I don’t know how I’ll do all this yet, but I do have a month to figure it all out. I’ll try to keep the size pretty contained and I’ll try to include some buildings other than the inn and some basic residential buildings.

I’ll see if I can find a good heuristic to do this, but if not, I’ll come up with my own. I do really like the ones I did last year, so I think I can find some reasonable way to do it again this year.