Map for Script Summoner
Click image to download high resolution version
About this Map
Eight years ago, while working on a master’s degree in computer science at Brigham Young University, I had the opportunity to take one of the most interesting classes of my degree - Computational Creativity. While most courses in my program focused on fitting problems into a well-defined framework and then optimizing some metric, this class was about programming computers to imitate the open-ended, messy, creative processes people use. I found it fascinating. Our professor divided the class into teams who each chose a project to work on to create a computer program that could do something creative. Class projects, in my semester and previous semesters, ranged from a children’s alphabet book generator to a surprisingly successful crock-pot recipe generator. For a time, my team, which was just myself and one other student, went back and forth on what we would build. I mentioned the project to my wife, Julie, and she suggested we build a fantasy map generator. My partner on the team agreed to the idea, and so the Nortantis fantasy map generator was born.
Nortantis uses a simple tectonic plate simulation to create land and ocean continents, then uses those continents to place mountains, hills, trees, rivers, deserts, and political regions. I used Stanford's natural language processing libraries (CoreNLP) to extract key words from books to use in a random name generator to name regions, mountains, and rivers. It even generated its own name. Since taking the class, I’ve continued to make incremental improvements to the program, such as adding color to political regions, cities, generating fractal-based and micro-texture based paper backgrounds, and an interactive editor. It’s now a somewhat popular open-source project.
While preparing to publish the first book of the Script Summoner series, I realized it should have a world map, which gave me the exciting opportunity to use Nortantis to create a map for an actual book. Julie helped with the effort by refining some of the mountain and tree images we originally drew for Nortantis (since she, unlike me, is an artist), and helping select names for rivers and cities from lists of names Nortantis generated. Together we made this map of the Script Summoner world.
