More excel mapping

Post date: Jan 16, 2014 6:57:56 PM

I hadn't updated my diary of pain map (in files section) in some time, now it is. If you don't have excel 2010 you can't see it in all it's glory, so here's a shot from a portion of level 7.

Unfortunately I saved previous levels in a previous version of office and they lost the nice fills. I also checked to see if google sheets or libra office could handle the fills, and they can't. I've also learned some new things from various other people doing this, and could now make it look far far nicer.

I somewhat like the clean look of this though, so not sure I'll change it. I'm usually about speed and usability, not being pretty.

I could make it look pretty old school easily with a blue/white map if I felt like it, and there'd be certain advantages. It'd probably look nicer without the grid, but I find the grid useful for play. I have stairs in purple/red so I can find them easier. Doors and pillars are in brown. Corridors and rooms have slightly different fills, as they have different rolls for what's there. It's far easier and faster to use format painter if you use as few borders as possible, and figured copy/pasting for the doors is much quicker too.

I still want to try remaking the sample dungeon to see if I can do it much faster than the 30 minutes it took before at some point.

So I did the top half of the sample dungeon again, it took somewhere around 7 minutes to get pretty close to what I did in gridmapper, although it took some time to fiddle around with shapes to get the missing details, and the stairs which gridmapper did easily. Total this took me 32 minutes. It was still easier in gridmapper, but would be harder if I wanted to change anything later especially after importing to add details. I still don't like the double line for doors though. I'm sure I can make a shape that'll work for doors, and once I have the shapes it'd be faster to get all that detail in excel.