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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sword of Spirit" data-source="post: 7010860" data-attributes="member: 6677017">I'll tell you where I'm at, you can judge whether I'm in your target demographic, and then I'll tell you how to sell me something.I occasionally create maps of regions of my world at different scales (anything from continent to 50 miles or so across), and dungeon maps. City maps might be cool, but I haven't gotten to them yet.I'm using the free versions of Hexographer and Dungeonographer. The map quality they produce is good enough for my purposes. Their learning curve and user-friendliness is in the middlin' range. Not bad but not great either. They are complete enough that I stopped my search for other things when I found them, but not so amazing I wouldn't pony up some cash for a significant upgrade. I have no interest in using some advanced graphic editing software to make fancy looking maps. If a simple program could let me make fancy looking maps without adding complexity to my experience I would definitely want to upgrade.That upgrade would include:1) Superb user-friendliness. A 70 year old ought to be able to use it once you tell them how "drag and drop" works with a mouse. That's a slight exaggeration, but I find most software designers fail miserably at making things truly user-friendly. Just because CTRL+SHIFT +_ hot keys, or, holding shift while using the middle mouse button, work for you, doesn't mean the average user wants to mess with it. Sure, include good hotkeys, but make sure literally everything can be done with the mouse with solid visual representation of what you are doing. And let me emphasize again: drag and drop and drag to paint are major winners in this department. It should also go without saying that learning curve should also be tied into this. If it takes effort to figure out the software, it by definition isn't very user-friendly.2) Visual appeal. Particularly with the maps themselves, but see the next one. 3) Enjoyable interface. The interface should be evocative of fantasy (or some other genre) cartography (or at least of GMing) rather than looking like it's designed for architects. Ideally it would actually be enjoyable to use. "Watch here while I throw some trees around. See, after you paint them, you can just twirl around this swirler icon to randomize their placement in the general area for a more organic look!" Thinks like slider bars rather than entering numbers (the option to do both is fine) increase visual appeal.4) "Comprehensive" yet accessible assets. It needs to have everything you would expect genre maps to have. So if it's for fantasy, I should be able to draw every type of terrain, location, whatever I would expect to find in D&D. I shouldn't have to spend extra cash for an asset pack that has stuff that should have just been there. On the other hand, it should be simple and easy to find and access the right assets. I shouldn't have to dig around every time I want to paint a grassy meadow or a deciduous forest, or a river.5) Good automatic generation. If you can move a few sliders, circle an area on your canvas, click "Go!" and it will randomly create wilderness terrain or an urban area in a pleasing way, that is a major plus.6) Not have any major holes. For instance, if all wilderness maps are at the same scale, and I can't make one where each hex (for instance) represents 60 miles because the software just isn't designed to handle that flexibility, that's a bad.7) Redundancy aside: No added complexity over what I'm already using.Over a year ago I looked around for free (and perhaps very low cost) options, and free Hexographer was the best thing I found, pretty much by far. I would not buy the paid version of Hexographer however, as its added features do not address some of the things I want enough to pay for. A competitor has to address exactly those things. Primarily, what I want is to be able to make maps that look a little better and spend significantly less time doing it. The ability to do so is worth the price range you are considering.</blockquote>

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