The last few months, I’ve been struggling a lot with how Trevers should look and how it has developed. Starting working on the city, I was soon encountered with the fact that river Vale (that seperates Trevers from the rest of the land in the east) doesn’t make any sense. Since I did now know any solutions at the time, I tend to just ignore it for a while and hope there would be ideas about how to fix this in the future. More than half a year later, that has not happened. Au contraire, there are even more problems like overall geography, place in history and structure all over the city. I’m getting in a downward spiral and more depressed by the look of the city week by week, which leads to slow progress, which leads to overthinking everything about the city and country in the first place.

I’m honest when saying I’m happy with some parts of the city, but for some reason it doesn’t add up at all when zooming out on the map. The island looks weird and a lot of things don’t make sense in physical geography. Starting a discussional collaboration with Refriedsushi — about which I’m very grateful and should be continued very soon — made me realise even more that some things don’t make sense. Luckily he provided me with some solutions, like making Trevers into a bunch of islands in a bay, that could later be landfilled. This looked like a good solution to me. Now, I just don’t know. It’s hard to envision the landmass as landfilled islands, especially since it is not designed that way.

But I tried to do it anyway. At first, it looks okay. Then again, I just feel like I don’t know enough about physical geography. The islands I created look weird to me. I’ve tried drawing them in a lot of ways. Of course they have to align with the history and the historic sites of the city, but when trying to make a development map of the city, I just don’t know where to start.

▲ Overlay how Trevers could look in the new situation around the time of colonisation, full image here

So I spend time in creating a history that maybe could help me out here. In history this should be the first settlement of the Ingerish colonists, but is it even plausible such a settlement to be started on one or some tiny islands in a large bay? It would probably have been a good thing if I started it from the beginning in history like some users do, developing it over time. I could do that now, but there will be so many things lost. Besides that, I have so many ideas left, but something just stops me from working on the island altogether. It’s a place that is essential for the region, but lately I’m just working on things like Fletcher and Starford, with the knowledge that should make more sense.

Eventually, I’ve yet arrived at the moment it’s just frustrating to map. I should have started everything else in the country by now, but I really want to finish this. I have to deal with it anyway. Again, there are a lot of things I like about the city that I built. But everything I try doesn’t seem to make any sense in the bigger picture. I’m doubting every decision I’d made since the start — almost two years ago.

Does anyone have had this experience too? Does anyone have any ideas how I could make any sense of the island and the city? What is the best thing to do now? I’m really lost at this point. This proves that working out things like history and geography before building are SO important.