The world of Lux and The Shadowmaker is very much inspired by a real place, so it is to that real place that I turned when sketching out a (very rough) idea of the lay of the land for the game. I put pen to paper and drew a slightly altered version of the walled garden outside my bedroom window at Lumb Bank, which I hope will be useful when we start designing the game.

So far I have a set of very rough mappings of:

• the first pathway,
• the walled garden,
• the field with the stream.

I haven’t added a lot of detail as the first build of the game will be just to get a working version that will allow us to test out the game play and mechanisms. Hopefully if we have enough time we can add in detail and extra things to find at a later date.

I roughed these out because at this point int he project there didn’t seem much sense in my attempting to start building a Unity 3D version of the walled garden or any of the other game locations. If would be far better to pay someone who can build that much more quickly than my current level of skill will allow. I have made some forays into Unity – enough to know that a. it does what I want the game to do and b. that it is very easy to get it wrong. There are too many other things to pull together on this project for me to spend my time cursing at software. I do want to improve my coding skills, just not until I have time to sit down with someone who knows what they are doing.

So, fingers crossed, the Queen of Code crowdfunder will raise enough money to pay someone to spend a month coding, as well as pay for a 3D artist to create a properly modelled version of the images that I am sketching out. These pen and ink mappings are a handy aide-memoir for me and useful when I try to explain the layout of the game. I hope they will also be a useful starting point for collaborative game-world building.