My WIP has a point geographically equivalent to the North Pole. That is, there are a lot of rooms which are all “south” of this point, in the sense that going north from those rooms brings you to that point (but not vice verse, for hopefully obvious reasons (there are too many such rooms)). I know that there’s an obvious gameplay difficulty with that (how do I walk away from the north pole when “go south” is ambiguous? How do I get to a particular room from the North Pole? etc.), but I solved it via interesting but irrelevant means. The problem I seem to be having is that mapping this is proving to be a nightmare. It looks like I’ll have to manually specify the locations of more than half the map (basically anything that isn’t directly on the prime meridian). This is untenable. I’m using Inform 7, and I’d basically have to have “Index map with X mapped Y of Z” statements for practically every room. Right now, I’m just trying to keep the index map vaguely usable, but getting it to release quality would require either all those statements, or hand-drawing the map, which I would prefer not to do as Inkscape is a pain in the ass for this kind of work. Are there any tools for hand-drawing maps, or any suggestions for making my room layout reasonably mappable?
Also, I’d prefer to keep the actual, in-game layout the way it is.
This is mostly irrelevant, but I’m using custom directions in this project, so when I say “north” I actually mean something else, but I’d rather not get into that. The point is that I can freely say things like “Index map with X mapped as Y”, where X is a custom direction and Y is not.