07062020

Spent about an hour this afternoon working on story stuff outside. The weather was exceptionally nice today: the horrid humidity that characterised the past week or so finally dissipated overnight and the temperature was comfortable, with sunshine and a strong persistent breeze all throughout the day. 

I hope by the end of this coming week to completely finish all story-related planning. As of today I think I’ve finalised the zoning for the various areas of the map: tomorrow I’ll start on zone 0 and work my way outwards along the river. The hardest part I imagine is gonna be establishing a sense of scale and verticality, which is consistent across each area; it’s been difficult to gauge as there’s not too many extant photos/videos on the internet that I’ve been able to find which demonstrate a good sense of how the area’s laid out in reality. I suppose in the worst-case scenario I’ll just have to take creative liberties with it… but seeing as I’ve gone this far already to ensure a degree of verisimilitude, I feel like it’s a bit of a copout if I just start bullshitting at this point. 

The other day I went through some scans of the area using both Google Maps and OpenStreetMap; I’ve been using the height map exported from the latter to Cities: Skylines to visualise scale and distribution thus far, but the quality of overhead data from either is predictably kinda lacklustre given the amount of tree coverage in the area, plus the failure of Street View (as there are obviously no roads). I’ve been trying to convince Haleigh to get up there at some point and take some pictures for me, but she understandably has school stuff. If it weren’t for the pandemic I would just go myself. At this point I’m strongly considering just opening up a general paid call on Twitter or something…