Fantasy Cartographer is a relaxing game about creating maps with hand‑drawn graphics. Build lands filled with seas, mountains, and forests, gather resources, develop cities and kingdoms, discover new drawings, complete quests, gain experience, and become a master of cartography.
Concept
In each game you receive a pool of random tiles that you should place on a blank board to create a map. Every tile can be rotated freely and contains a random arrangement of mountains, forests, meadows, swamps, water, buildings, or settlements.
Each settlement gathers resources from its own buildings and from surrounding terrain: fields provide food, mountains provide production, and water provides both food and gold. Settlements also collect resources from buildings, animals, and ships connected to them via roads, rivers, or coastlines.
Food allows a settlement to grow by adding new buildings. Production allows upgrades to existing buildings. Gold goes into a general pool. Each settlement also has a range that determines how far its influence extends. Different buildings have different construction costs and produce different resources. The entire process of growth and upgrading is automated in the basic version of the game.
Drawing
Terrain tiles are placed on a hex‑based grid. In addition, you can freely draw individual mountains, forests, trees, meadows, swamps, buildings, settlements, animals, water segments, roads, rivers, or labels anywhere on the map. Every drawing has a gold cost. Almost all map elements are animated to imitate the process of hand‑drawing - the entire map gradually appears before your eyes in real time.
Folks (Races)
The game will feature 23 playable folks (races or species). Each will have its own map frame, emblem, and unique graphics for all buildings. Each folk will also have special buildings that provide unique resources or functions. They also have special traits (for example, Dwarves gain extra gold from mountains and have a production bonus) and their own sets of prefixes and suffixes for generating names of villages, cities, mountain ranges, etc.
States (Countries)
You can place one or more states on the map, in any color. A state may consist of a single folk, but multiple folks can coexist within it. Likewise, each settlement may contain several ethnic minorities alongside its main people.
In addition to basic resources, settlements also generate strength, produced for example by castles and watchtowers. Strength influences state borders and contributes to conquests - the takeover of settlements from one state by another.
Experience
In the game, you earn experience, levels, and ranks. Experience comes from completing a map as well as from fulfilling tasks during its creation. These tasks may ask you to draw, for example, a forest of a certain size, a settlement with a specific population, or a state of a particular area.
Tasks have levels - higher levels demand more but grant better rewards. Rewards include extra experience, tiles, gold, or drawings. In the basic version of the game you start with only one people and a few basic drawings (mountains, water segments, buildings). Everything else is unlocked gradually by completing tasks on new maps. New folks are also unlocked as high‑level task rewards.
Current Progress
At the moment I have completed 5 out of 23 planned folks:
• Albins - humans inspired by Medieval Europe
• Erabs - humans inspired by Greek, Persian, and Arabian cultures
• Barbarians - humans inspired by Norse and Scottish traditions
• Jin-Hans - humans inspired by Mongolian, Chinese and Japanese cultures
• Enuits - humans inspired by Inuit culture
The remaining 18 are waiting - including dwarves, elves, halflings, orcs, and many more.
Many planned features are already functional, while several modes and systems are still in development. I'm currently working on the Steam video trailer and a climate system that affects the appearance and resources of forests and fields.
I don't have a release date yet, but I plan to launch the first playable version once the game reaches 10–12 folks. Additional folks will be added later as free updates, and I don't intend to release them as paid DLC. There will also be no microtransactions in the game.
Official site
On Steam
Details