Chris Crawford on Game Design

Building the Map

While I was doing all this reading, I kept myself busy with a simple project that consumed plenty of time. I needed a map of the world that I could fit into the Mac's 512×342 screen. Nowadays we'd just scan something in, doctor it a bit, and voila!—there's our map! Unfortunately, we didn't have scanners back then, nor did we have photo manipulation programs. Besides, I needed more than just an image; I needed a digitized map with individually addressable countries. In other words, I needed a data structure for each country that defined its boundaries. I had to have graphics of each and every country in the game.

My solution was simple and straightforward. I placed a wall map of the world onto the floor and taped semi-transparent ...