Thank you so much! I poured so much time into that map, so I'm very happy to read this :D
I'd absolutely love to go over the creation process! I've actually even outlined it recently, as a part of the process of creating a portfolio for myself. It's a bit of a process, because I put a lot of pre-planning into the shape and layout of the city before even diving in to the part where I drew it! haha. I'll write out the entire thing here though! I used a "Mapgen4" for the base landmass, AutoCAD (just because I'm used to it) for planning the city portions, and then Krita at the end to bring it all together and draw it.
The images may all be a bit small here, but you can click on them for larger versions if you like!
The initial base layer of the map was created with a program named "Mapgen4" by Red Blob Games. This allowed for the mountains, rivers, and biomes to be located on the landform. The base idea for this city was then decided to be a massive coastal metropolis formed from three other smaller cities growing and eventually merging.
Next, I traced the outlines into AutoCAD and begun the planning process. I chose the most logical spot for a village to start, and then slowly started "expanding", as if it were growing over the ages. Buildings were placed, attacks and raids were planned out, and locations of
destruction were noted. Eventually the initial village was destroyed and fragmented into two smaller villages.
The previous method of "expanding" the city was repeated, adding in more population centers, more permanent structures, agriculture, infrastructure, and transportation. Ruins and previous village centers were noted for naming and travel purposes.
With the city properly aged up to the "Modern" era of Cathedris, I started to section it off into districts, and plan the roads between them all. With this, the planning was done, and this base image was taken into a digital art program where I worked on the terrain and aesthetics to produce the set of in-world blueprints you see to the left.
I took that final result from AutoCAD, pasted it into Krita as an underlay, and got to work drawing! I redid the terrain, and followed my CAD underlay as a guideline for where many of the buildings would go. I shifted the colours to blue, and began work on the blueprints. The elevation contours on the mountains are fairly simple -- the closer together they are, the more steep of an incline they represent. I just drew them as they needed to be drawn based on the actual geography I had made with Mapgen4.
As for the layers that were the catacombs map and old russin map, I turned a new layer on in Krita and set it to 50% transparency, and then began drawing on top of everything! That way I could tell where things were and plan each piece out so it fit together. I saved them as separate images and uploaded each to World Anvil, which I then used as the different layers you can select on the map.
I think I covered everything, if not let me know! Hopefully I didn't go too overboard on things either, I get kinda carried away talking about this! haha.