Technical Post - PBH Map Development (Patreon)

Hey everyone! It's adi again, with another PBH technical post!

You may have seen in an update a little while back, but I've been working hard on the map for Please Be Happy! It was a multi-day affair, and I underestimated the workload… drastically. But I'm more well informed now, and I thought I might share the process with you all!

First things first - Wellington! I went to Google Maps and took a screenshot, rotating it until I was happy with the angle and zoom.

I also, ahem, scribbled on it a bunch, figuring out the key locations on the game and how it would be marked. I also used Google's help to calculate walking distances to help out! This is Wellington Central, by the way - the city itself is way longer and definitely takes more than an hour to get from one end to another. Miho doesn't have a car, though, so everything's kind of restricted around that!

While most of these locations are real, Juliet's house is made up and there's a different building on that street corner. F…fantasy Wellington, okay? I took some creative liberties.

Once I was done with that, I adjusted zoom again to make sure all the elements fit but are as big as possible. I also doodled some UI onto it too, to get a more accurate feel of what I was working with. I marked off the selectable areas with those big brown chunks, and I stepped back, admiring my handiwork…

…But I didn't like it. First of all, the Google Maps colours were way too obviously… Google Maps. Secondly, I didn't like how the roads looked!!! This was pretty devastating considering I spent all day (and a bit of the day before) tracing every single road.

Tried adjusting colours… better, but still not great.

At this point, I decided to do what I do whenever I get stuck - look at references!

PBH has a light art nouveau influence running throughout, so I searched for 'antique map' and 'art nouveau map', and found these:

https://aboutartnouveau.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/sarajevo-map-1929-an-route.jpg

https://cdn0.rubylane.com/_pod/item/1415055/a584/Art-Nouveau-Map-Boston-including-Train-pic-1A-2048%3A10.10-86-f.jpg

New possibilities running through my mind, I went back to my map!

Now I was getting somewhere! I threw over a paper texture too, and removed a lot of the thinner roads to try and help the look.

I also traced the whole thing again. Yeah. Yes I Know. But my original trace was too scratchy and not bold enough. I combined the pencilly original trace to the bolder 2nd one for this effect, making one of the layers red instead of dark brown.

Josh asked if there was anything I could do to better suggest the more fantastical setting of the world, and I wanted to give it a stronger hand-made touch, so after a lot of thinking, I came up with this!

Princess Maker was another inspiration while working on this. I used to play a lot of PM4 as a kid…

Happy with the overall direction, I set off to make the final assets to go on top!

First were the character icons! They'll have a little face on top of locations to show where they are at any given location. Miho's was done for the little speaking Miho on the map, but I could see her icon being used on the map as well!

After that, I made little icons for various different indicators on the maps too - indicators for 'it's a date!' 'it's the main story!' 'this will use a time segment!'.

And lastly but oh god not the least… The individual location icons. This took me… a long time. But it's done now!!! I hope anyone who's been to Wellington feels the locations from these icons, I really tried my best to capture each location (though I haven't been to a handful of them, like Hataitai Park or Zealandia… maybe on my next visit..!)

Once that was done, I could finally move on to putting them all -

Oh the clouds.

I drew the clouds.

Once that was done, I could finally move on to putting them all together!

It took me a fair while, and I adjusted other elements as I did it too. The map base is much lighter, for example, and each location has a stronger glow.

Overall though, I'm really happy with how it turned out! I underestimated the work involved with this, and I will take my humble pie and eat it. Map makers? You're doing great.

Thanks for reading!
-adi