I had a longer day than usual at work (volunteering afterward, so it's nothing bad, but it did get in the way of my getting other stuff done). However, I discovered a new piece of software called Wonderdraft. It's a map-making tool in early access, and it offers some stuff that the other software I have doesn't.

I've been using Dungeonfog, and it's quite good, but it focuses on grids and interiors and doesn't really do world-scale maps.

However, Wonderdraft is custom-built to do large-scale maps (e.g. country or continent scale).

A semi-final map of Othenar I created in about 20 minutes or so.

The one thing that made me anxious about Wonderdraft is that it's $20 and it doesn't really have any demo or anything like that. I watched a YouTube video that showcased it, which I've linked to below, and decided that it was worth the risk.

Video created by WASD20

Features I Tested

• Height-map based land creation
• Land color painting tools
• Custom overlays
• Symbols (of all sorts)
• The river tool
• The path tool
• Text tools
• Random landmass generation tools

One of the listed features is Wacom tablet support, which I might touch on at a later date, but I've been bad about cleaning my desk and my tablet's buried under a layer of books, so it's not something I can really vouch for personally.

I have also been incapable of testing custom assets or themes, because I don't have any. However, the software does seem to support them, which could be nice.

Example map in an alternate style, created with random generation.

I also can't really talk about the speed of the program. 1920x1080 editing works really smoothly, and I'm testing an ~8000x4800 map, which is going a little slowly on random generation but seems to go fine on regular editing. It would be nice to see this limit removed for people who need really high resolution, but I can see the potential performance issues getting in the way (it's eating a cool gigabyte of RAM right now).

The real reason for this, however, is that my computer for whatever reason just occasionally decides to struggle with performance, and it's going through one of these phases. So the fact that it's working fine right now is a good thing. There are some small issues with lag while using very large brushes, but nothing you wouldn't get with similar use cases in, say, the GIMP or Photoshop.

All the features I tested worked as expected. Actually, it's worth noting that not only did they work as expected, they were incredibly intuitive. This is a well-designed piece of software (though, admittedly, the video I watched helped acclimate me, so I wasn't going in blind).

Good, Bad, and Ugly

Now it's time to get to the real meat of the matter.

The Good

Well, I'll say this. Wonderdraft is easy to use. It's fantastically quick, and took me very little time to figure out (the video I watched was ~20 minutes long, and I used it for ~20 minutes and felt immediately comfortable).

It has a robust undo-redo feature, which is something that even Inkscape has been bothering me with recently (for whatever reason its undo system often misses little things).

It's also good at making really pretty looking maps, at least at first glance. The UI is plenty handy and it's simple enough that it won't take people who aren't used to multi-layer editing much time to get into it. Likewise, difficult things like shading that are time consuming and stand out when done wrong can be done by the software, which is a great time-saver. Symbols are automatically randomized, and look good in general. You can pretty easily get four or five distinct styles of map created with the same core asset set, including Tolkeinesque maps.

If you don't like shading, it does have a flat black-and-white setting. I might use this to make a quick provincial map for Segira, because the Inkscape map is currently an unusable mess.

The symbol libraries also seem pretty extensive. You can see both inked and uninked symbols on the right, including a compass rose, medieval-style drawings, and both trees and mountains/hills. You can scale these, though they don't seem to be vectors.

Custom asset support also exists, which is very handy for fonts; I would want to import a font like Lato before using the program for Segira because the font selection is limited and stylized.

The Bad

Wonderdraft doesn't seem to use any sort of vector map, so you're limited to whatever resolution you start with and you can't scale up (which is especially a shame, because the grayscale heightmaps that it uses for land would scale up well and then have filters applied, so there's a missed opportunity there).

Another thing that you're able to see in the upper right is that the rasterization can be a huge problem. At a 1920x1080 resolution, it's really quite obvious. On my larger 8k map, it's not nearly as bad; working in a higher resolution than you need and sampling down is a work-around, therefore, but it's still going to be a little problematic because you wind up with having to work with larger file sizes than you need. Large-scale symbols work well here as well.

Somehow it manages to create a situation where you have text that both looks unduly constricted and heavily aliased, which is not good on many different levels. You can see this with the symbols as well, though it's not as severe.

The Ugly

Strictly fantasy support by default. No modern/sci-fi elements, including fonts more suitable for such maps.

The asset loading system seems pretty robust, but it's done manually and not terribly intuitive. There are examples, but there's still no built-in system to do it, which makes it the least novice-friendly part of the program. Custom fonts go at the end of the list, and not in alphabetical order, so I had to do a few takes before I found the font I installed and was actually about to be sad that I couldn't get it working. I don't know if other custom assets work the same way, though this would only be terribly important for symbols in all likelihood, since there are relatively few mountain and tree offerings (though each symbol is actually part of a random family, so kudos there).

Final Thoughts

Wonderdraft is fantastic. With customization support and continued updates, I could see it going a long way. At $20, it's pretty reasonably priced in comparison to many other alternatives on the market, and though it's in early access I would see no problem using it for finished, good-looking maps.

I'm not sure if there are plans to grow the official asset libraries, but there's enough stuff to be versatile with. The town in the Othenar map was made piecemeal with existing assets, and I think it turned out swimmingly.

If you don't have an existing software like this, I recommend it. You'll still do some work by hand, but it's the easy work, the part that gives the map character, rather than the busywork that goes into making it look polished.