It’s better, once you have the text in, to drag the side handle to resize it to fit. Text boxes in Google Drawings can sometimes be really long. Encourage folks to copy & paste text boxes which they can then edit. If you size the text to where you want it, people will be better able to make their names the right size (and right font). Most importantly, give at least one added element a name with a text box. Sometimes I will add some details- a bit of coastline, a lake, a river, a symbol for a city-so that people have a better idea of how big to make things when they add elements. On the other, they don’t have a sense of the scale. On the one hand, players can add anything they want.

I suspect nearly everyone knows about this now, but on the off chance-get to know it.Ī blank background layer is both open and intimidating. If you’re not familiar with the concept of layers in drawing, look that up-it’s a hugely helpful way to think about visual elements. Note: I am going to refer to this initial rectangle as our background layer throughout. Instead you can make your background layer larger than this. It may look like that delimits the size of your image, but it doesn’t. You’ll notice when you create a new Google drawing there’s a square with a light checkerboard background (indicating transparency). To start with I make a large, blank rectangular shape. There’s another reason I’ll come back to in a moment. I do this because most of the time online we’re already working within a Google Sheet, so using another Google tool is easier. There are a lot of shared whiteboard tools out there, but my default is to use Google Drawings. I love map-building games and so I enjoy this process in Legacy: Life Among the Ruins and Free from the Yoke. If you have additional suggestions, I’d love to hear those in the comments. These aren’t the only or best techniques and tools, just what I’ve become comfortable using. In this first part, I’m gong to focus on tools for doing shared map-making in online games. There are two kinds of maps I’m going to cover: collaborative and campaign. I should also note that what I’m talking about isn’t for those skills & experience with photo programs-if you’re good at that then you’re ahead of what I’m talking about. There’s also Campaign Cartographer, but that’s a tool that requires some investment of time and learning. I’ve used Hex Kit before and I highly recommend it, it that’s a style you want to go for.

There are many resources out there for map making. Here I’m talking about quick, rough, and dirty approaches. In an earlier post I wrote about some basic tools for names this week I want to talk about some basic tools for mapping.

Fantasy world building map creator free