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Open Source. The previous entries pretty much covered the map-making process from a research and graphical perspective, but not the process by which the map becomes a game board. Before moving on to that subject, I wanted to post the source maps that were used. And so, here is the list. The maps are all online (except of course, for the Friends of the National Parks at Gettysburg maps, which are protected by copyright) for your viewing pleasure. The maps are, of course, also accessible from the research section of the website.
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In Whose Name? Adding names to the map is an exercise that is at once trivial, vexing, and rewarding. It is trivial because it is hard to really feel like you’re doing anything in the least bit creative while you’re doing it: you read the name on your source, you add it to your map, and repeat, repeat, repeat. It can be vexing because different sources don’t necessarily agree on spelling, and it is hard to feel productive when you’re spending time trying to figure out whether the name of a feature is “Herr Ridge” or “Herr’s Ridge". It can be rewarding because oddly enough, when you’re done, it rather magically converts your work from a picture to a map. Such is the power of words and the such is hold of language on our consciousness.
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Two Watches. “A man with one watch always knows what time it is. A man with two is never sure.” – Segal’s Law. This entry is about the research headache introduced by two credible but conflicting maps for the town of Gettysburg and the process that led to the creation of the map for the game board. Also covered are the addition of the various farm buildings on the battlefield and the process by which the buildings on the southern edge of the board (which the primary source map does not cover) were reconstructed.
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Road Show. To me, the visual signature of maps of the Gettysburg battlefield is the network of roads converging on Gettysburg from all points of the compass. This convergence of roads is in fact why a battle occured at Gettysburg in the first place; with both armies moving around in a relatively small area in southern Pennsylvania, Gettysburg was a hard place for them to avoid. This diary entry is about the creation of the road network for the game board.
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A Stone’s Throw. One odd feature of the Gettysburg battlefield were the boulder fields near its southern end (around Little Round Top and Devil’s Den). The 1868 map showed them, but none of the other main source maps I was using did. This was particularly a problem regarding the southern end of the game map, which the 1868 map did not cover. It occured to me that fields of giant boulders weren’t likely to be things that would change very much over time and so a modern source might still be quite good, and this is what led me to pull the satellite imagery I’ve shown bits of in previous diary entry.
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Can’t See the Forest. Where good quality contemporary maps of a battlefield are unavailable, reconstruction of tree cover can be a major challenge. Over time, naturally wooded areas can be cleared for agricultural or other uses, and cleared land can be abandoned and left to return to its natural state. These sorts of changes follow no fixed and general rules. A modern map used as a source may show tree cover that is quite close or quite different from what it was at some earlier time, but without an older map to use for comparison, there is no reliable way to tell which is the case. This diary entry describes the process of reconstruction of tree cover for the game map, and also how it was rendered in the map art.
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Unbottled Water. Having dealt with relief in the last entry, this entry will take up one of the major forces of nature that creates relief: water. From a research point of view, Gettysburg poses no particular challenges, but hydrology can be a problem in map development. While relief generally changes only slowly, hydrology is different; both natural and man-made events can produce very substantial changes in short periods of time, which has the potential to greatly complicate battlefield reconstruction.
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What a Relief! This design diary entry opens up the topic with a discussion of mapboard development by discussing how the relief layer of the mapboard is researched and represented. This is done in the context of the history of cartography and wargame design. This may be my favorite design diary entry ever; much of it is material that I’ve been wanting to write about for some time but have never been able to pull together into a coherent article before. Oh, and did I mention that it has lots of pretty pictures? Design diary entries are just so much more fun when well-illustrated.
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Battery D. As promised, this entry deals with the cover art and box design. The photograph is of Battery D, 2nd U. S. Artillery Regiment, and was taken by Timothy H. O'Sullivan, and developed and published by Alexander Gardner. The diary entry gives some background on the photograph itself, how it was selected for the game box, and how the general design of the game box was built around it. As is sometimes the case with me, the subject has much more to do with graphic design as history than game design per se, which some may of course find more interesting than others. Oh, and also, those who find stories of obsessive behavior enjoyable may also find something here to their taste.
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Putting Spade to Ground. In spite of the fact that the design diary for my previous game, Napoleon’s Triumph, revealed how terribly slow and halting the design process was for that game (and how many blind alleys it went down prior to completion), people did seem to enjoy reading it, and so I’ve decided to keep a diary for the new game, The Guns of Gettysburg, as well. Whether it will prove to be a good idea or not remains to be seen, but it will be attempted. As was true last time, the diary could not be published until enough work had been done on the game that confidence that it would be published was reasonably high, which meant that a good deal of design work was actually completed before the diary was begun, and so the diary will mix descriptions of old work with updates on new. The first entry will deal with the question of topic selection.
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