Lux: "The Lantern" (part 1 of 3)

I started playing Lux, an online Risk-style game by Sillysoft, a few months ago. It's a highly addictive game for several reasons, not the least of which is that you get to design your own maps and boards to play Risk games on. You can design a map and a background image.
So of course I had to show off my graphics skills.

I won't bore you with details of what Risk is or what Lux is. Want to learn more, go to http://www.sillysoft.net and look around. The game's only 25 bucks (and that's a one-time payment, there's no monthly fee or any such crap), I highly recommend it.

Okay, first off, I needed an idea of what to do for a map. I was mostly inspired by the innovative gameplay ideas of a veteran independent mapmaker named Rick Godman (AKA RickLionhart, designer of such great Lux maps as "Borg," "Monopoluxy," and my favorite map of all time, "Get Factored"), but I needed an original theme to work around. So I started browsing the Sillysoft forums and found a page where people could post map ideas that they couldn't do themselves. And found something that sounded promising. Someone had posted:

"Storm the Lantern - Picture a board a bit like Trivial Pursuit, with a centre continent (single country) - call it lantern - which can be attacked in one direction from 6 flanks. Each of these flanks should only allow attacking in single direction towards the centre. Maybe two rings instead of 1 to allow troop build up. Make the lantern worth a ridiculous high bonus (say 20) so that claiming it be a major factor in winning. Make the flanks worth a couple as well."

Well, it was an idea. I opened Photoshop and created a blank file, filling it with a simple colored background. I drew a white hexagon at the center, and then copied and pasted some white rectangles for a while to make a little Trivial Pursuit board with an extra outer ring, like the entry recommended. The rectangles themselves were plain white, since I'd be drawing over them in the background anyway. They were spaced apart precisely with just a little zooming in and measuring.
For the rectangles in the outer rings, I wanted more of a ring shape, to make the edge look a little more circular, so I decided to make the outer spaces quadrangles instead of rectangles.

To make the extra area line up, I drew a straight line from the exact center of the work out right across the inner corner of the rectangle, out beyond the outer corner. Then I just highlighted the vertical space between that line and the edge of the triangle, and filled that in with white, then repeated the process on the other side.

Then I just copied and pasted that in a ring around the six shafts towards the center. I put six of those special spaces down, one at the outer end of each shaft, then I copied and pasted that circle to rotate it to make some spaces in between those shafts. I found that by holding down the SHIFT key on my keyboard as I hand-rotated the copy of the circle, I was able to make a very nice ring without even having to type in a precise degree in the "rotation" box at the top once.
For the middle ring (I wanted one space in between the two rings, at the same place as the junction), I just copied the original inner ring and increased its size to 120% easily. Then for the outer ring of the board, I flattened the three six-space rings of the inner ring into one eighteen-space ring, and increased the size on that to 120% twice and that was done. I saved the file as a JPEG to make it loadable in the Lux map editor, and it was ready to go.

Time to make the map.