# Mapmaking Discussion & Philosophy (WIP/Critique) > Board Game Mapping >  xTrain boardgame

## pavelvon

Hi Boardgamers,
  Because of a xTrain game dev, I became a carthographer :-). The map I'm on to is an Island with rails and stations. Following are pictures showing drafts and progress of it's creation. So far I'm a newbie to the map creation, I expect a lot of mistakes, even thought I studied various tuts from the Guilders.

Here is the draft:



Land, sea and moutains with forest generated:
, 



And finaly the game layer:


At this point I'm actually stucked. Although I added the station points with short description, I feel they somehow doesn't belong to this map. The road - railway is still not dashed (this is not a problem), but how to show / create the railway stops?
And the station Names as well ...

When I find some possible way, I will post it here. Maybe someone can help with few tips and tricks.

Thanks for reading/comments,
PavelVon

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## Blather

As far as creating the railway stops you could hand draw the image, scan it, apply the appropriate transparencies and then save the image as a bmp. I am not totally familiar with this process but is is doable. Campaign Cartographer 3 is the software I will be working with. Some of the tutorials for it explain this process. I think you could find any number of vids on the subject though. With the names you may just have to experiment with fonts and font color to get this right. I think you may need to look at the overall product design to work it in. Good luck with the project, what you have so far looks fantastic.

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## pavelvon

Very good Blather !!! You read my thoughts, really. I was wandering what would childrens make to like the map. And images was the answer  :Very Happy: .
I already started to doole some images yesterday. The first ideas came swiftly and clearly. Here are few of them. Just hand doodles. I can't wait to try some of them on the map.
I spent a lot of time reading tutorial (specialy on this forum) and doing tryouts, that I can imagine a way to bring it to the map.



My first Idea was to create the images in ISO view. The idea came so suddenly, that I haven't seen my daughter's image on the other side of the sheet in my scatchbook.
So the circles are not my delirium, but my daughter's doodle  :Razz: . And the scanner is uncompromising to me  :Smile: .

Your tip just underscore the correct way in the case of this map.

Cheers Blather,
PavelVon

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## Blather

WOW! Those look fantastic! You my good sir have quite a talent. Take a look at the Profantasy site and it shows some of their image catalogs. Or you can do a search for icons on Google. Google the type of icon you are looking for or just reduce the size or type of image it should return. You are on the right track, pun intended. The way you are depicting the images is dead on. They convey more information than just names on a map. If this game is for all ages it works so much the better. As for children, the image of your mine stop conjures up the sound of that machine. Making connections like this is a great way to get emergent experiences from playing a game.

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## pavelvon

Hi there,
  I'm actually following the hints and thoughts to bring "icons" resp. images to the map. 
I thought it would be easy to find suitable images, but alas! it took ages to find something suitable.
This leads me to the isometrics forums like pixel joint, where I found some beautiful stuff and hints.
  But till I will be able to produce something on my own, I use any images possible  :Smile: .

So, here is the actual map. Some picts are still missing. If enyone has a good source of isometric buildings (actually some farms are needed ...) please let me know. 
I'm using A3 page size in Gimp, but I exported this image to 1024x768 only as it's only for the overall preview purposes. If anybody wants more datail. I will upload it.



Cheers,

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