We've been teasing it for a while and it is finally time to give you more insights into our newest map coming exclusively for alliances later this month! It's time to travel to the frigid terrain of Antarctica and vie for supremacy!

With that in mind, we had a quick interview with our design team, where they speak about their ambitions about this map, the design process and how everything came to be!

• What inspired the map?
  

Paul: Work on the Antarctica map started back in 2018, by our then map designer Lunar. The idea was to bring in something completely new and fresh to the game, an area of the world that we’d never explored on any of our maps. This idea is also what made us keep coming back to the map, year after year.

• How did the first attempts go?
  

Paul: Well I can’t speak for Lunar’s first attempt, though I know that when I jumped on it back in 2019 that a lot of good work had been done on it. Lunar then gave me the map that year mostly to train me in the mystical ways of map design. I spent hours just researching and learning the actual tools of the trade, occasionally making some small progress and occasionally making some horrible mistakes as well.

• How did the scope change over time?
  

Paul: This is where things got a bit wild. Originally we just wanted a fresh area for players, but this map then turned into our ‘experimentation grounds’. All sorts of crazy ideas were tossed at this map, seeing what would stick and what wouldn’t. Whole new ways of movement, of making provinces, of entering the game, and lots more.To top it off, it didn’t help that I was still new and learning at the time. Don’t get me wrong, the craziness of it all certainly helped me to learn much faster, but it did not help the map to get finished.

• What halted the first attempts?
  

Paul: In the end, the scope and work were simply too much. Working on the map was a blast, but we also had several other maps in the pipeline, updates for mobile conversion that we needed to work on, and bug fixes in general.We’d revisit this map from time to time, but overall the idea itself was simply deemed ‘too big’ and was shelved until we had some time to work on something just a little bit smaller.

• What restarted development on the map?
  

Paul: Honestly, it was mostly down to Garrett joining the map team this year. Remembering the good old training I had on that map, I figured why not let Garrett train on this map as well?

Garrett: The Antarctica map was like an induction ceremony for me after joining the game design team. I needed something to get my hands dirty with and something which, if I broke, would not be the end of the world. And thus started Garrett’s journey in map design.

• Were there any changes in the design?
  

Paul: After seeing how well Garrett was going with his training, we figured why not bring the map back? This time though, we insisted on sticking to a smaller scale and went for an alliance map. No crazy experimentation this time, just a good old alliance map.

Garrett: Having gone from a normal-sized map to an alliance scale, it brought with it a few changes, most notably to the number of nations, the distribution of cities and provinces, starting resources and units, as well as the economy of both players and AI nations on the map. The scaling down of the number of players allowed us to give a more fleshed-out feel to each nation especially since we had more room to work with when it comes to the geographical structure of the respective nations. This coupled with the semi-fictional setting allowed us to experiment a bit with different compositions, resulting in some irregular shapes for some of the nations.

• How did the new development go?
  

Garrett: Surprisingly enough, it was pretty much smooth sailing once I got the basics down. With Paul and Lunar’s guidance and patience, we got the ball rolling after we pinned down the scope of the map. There were a few hiccups here and there sure, but nothing too major. It was a perfect opportunity for me to learn the software, design documentation, and the thought processes when designing a new map. This enabled me to also start working on some general updates on already existing maps too and get a clearer understanding of the balancing, economy, and geographical structures of our maps.

• Were there any particular problems?
  

Paul: Of course. From my end, I got Covid midway through development and had to leave Garrett on his own for a week, whilst dealing with said affliction. When it finally came to pushing out the map, the nation selector completely broke on us, so I spent a few days with the devs trying to figure out what was going on there.

Garrett: I wouldn’t exactly call them problems (apart from the nation selector breaking). I think some of the more notable challenges that came up were shortlisting of the nations to be included in this map, since Antarctica doesn’t have enough locations and claims to fill up an alliance map, which is why we took Frontage Theory as our basis for nation selection and distribution. Coupled with this was the city and province names being semi-fictional on Antarctica; not ideal, but we would’ve made some people unhappy if we were to invent names for said locations.Another issue which came up in the latter part of the design process was a scaling issue between the geographical points, and the background image.

• How does it feel now the map is done?
  

Paul: It’s a bit surreal, seeing a map that’s been around for so long finally head out into the open world. We still have a lot of plans to update and improve the map over time, but for now, I’m extremely happy to finally see this map out there.

Garrett: Ah the word ‘done’! Is it really done? Definitely not. But I guess that’s the beauty of it, in that it’s not just a map that we put back on our shelves and move on to the next one. We gave birth to it, now we have to raise it, together with our players.The best way to talk about this experience is through this analogy. Think of the Antarctica map as a Dorado baby, with Lunar being the father since he came up with the concept, I’m the mother since I delivered it, and Paul being the midwife since I couldn’t have done it without his help and guidance. Now that the ‘baby’ is born, now comes the nurturing phase, in which we will have to constantly keep an eye out on any improvements we can make, feedback to receive and changes to be implemented. In other words, only the first part is done. But, it was a blast working on the map and I sincerely hope it will be received well! Is it perfect, definitely not! Is it good? You tell me!