Wed 12 May 2021, 14:31
Those are beautiful. It's a level of complexity I never considered for an Alien game (I just mean the idea you'd involve large cities rather than little isolated places in distant reaches; I'm guessing the idea of Xenomorph infestations become full-scale zombie plagues gets some attention) and the execution is stunning.
My two cents on mapmaking tips and tricks (i.e. my unsolicited response to Exile's question) boils down to these.
Know what you want to depict. Photoshop wouldn't be my go-to (more on that in a minute) but the app I'd use depends big-time on what I'm trying to map. I have a very simple Hadley's Hope-level planetary colony, and the easiest way to do it for me was Microsoft Visio. It's a diagramming tool but it's reasonably intuitive, has the features to do an acceptable job (I'm trying to a quick screenshot of mine up) and can export as a vector (more on that in a minute too). For Mentorian complexity I wouldn't ever consider Visio because trying to pull that off is either a) Impossible or b) A long, lonely, frustrating drive down the road to insanity (Guessing A).
For an urban area like this one, my go to would be Adobe Illustrator. That clearly isn't to say Photoshop is wrong (I doubt I could produce maps as nice as these with anything) but Illustrator checks more boxes for me personally. There are a couple great assets I use for this kind of map (I have, of course, lost the link, but I used a site with a ton of free vector maps of real urban areas that can go straight into Illustrator; the good ones have all the identifying details in an easily-purged separate layer and this resource has saved me a ton of time over the years). Using a non-rasterized format makes moving the basic details after you put them down incredibly easy which I value in particular if I'm going to draw a map totally from scratch).
If you aren't familiar with vector illustrations (you don't see them a lot in places where you'd spot them), the perk is that you can change their size at will and not lose resolution. Small handout, full-size map, wall poster if you are committed, no problem. I've had enough problems with discovering my hard work won't scale to where I want it over the years, I found this feature really attractive.
I will hedge on that - I've seen people do incredible art with Illustrator, I've never gotten good enough to figure out how - exporting it at the size you want to Photoshop and making it prettier makes plenty of sense. Also if you want to go straight into photoshop (or anything else) you still can get maps to use - OpenStreetMap exports in several formats last time I checked.
I have never wanted to use one for a map of a city or continent but the internet is now loaded with paid and free mapmaking tools for GMs that are supposed to be stupid easy to use. I'm a convert to DungeonScrawl (which is for, go figure, dungeons, but no reason you can't use it for buildings or small complexes) and it's a quality tool, so I'm guessing some of the others out there are probably pretty legit at that point too).
At this point, though, I'm wondering if the best advice for mapmaking I can give you is to just hire Mentorian. Wow.