Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-43531095-20190817081522

Hi Gravity Falls gang, I'm a new forum member but have been watching the show for years and am finally getting deeper into the background and decided to try my luck with the forum here for some help! Great site, BTW!! It's a fantatastic resource.

While this isn't supposed to be an intro post, a bit about me: I'm 42, father of two girls (8 and 11), and I make home brew board games. In the past I've made lots of 3D models of custom games and in 2013 I started doing most of my work digitally, starting with some pretty basic stuff (Yahtzee, etc) and then moving on to a kids racing game based on Sugar Rush from Wreck-it Ralph. I've also made other games too that wouldn't be of interest here, but the reason I'm on the forum is that we've been talking a lot at home lately about a Gravity Falls game. I don't really do game design and mechanics, I just steal elements from games that we already like and mash them together with what ever theme we're interested in.

So, I've come to the point that I need a good map of the entire Gravity Falls town site.... and none of them area quite right. Sure there's several maps floating around, and they have vaguely consistent with eachother and with the show, but none of them are quite right. Yes,  I get it - it's a cartoon show, trying to find an accurate map is asking a lot... but this is Disney, first of all. Secondly, the maps they did make are pretty darn good and I'm convinced that Alex and their design team would have had a map that they worked from so that the town layout was fairly consistent from episode to episode.

Here's what I've been able to find (including a pretty good attempt to sketch a realistic map of the whole area):

The intent with using a map like one of these for a board game would be to have it blown up to 2'x2' or so and have routes/pathways that characters can take from location to location... and I'd ideally like to have a spot to stop for each location in Gravity Falls. I've already done the work of figuring out how many locations I need to have on the map (59, not counting locations below ground, the many locations in the forest, mountains, Gravity Malls, or along Redwood Highway... each of them will have their own expanded mini-map area off to the side of the board).

So my problem is that none of the maps that I can find seem to have what I would consider to be the correct layout except for the map insert in the book "Dipper's and Mabel's Guide to Mystery and Non-stop Fun", which is the 3rd image here. Sadly a bunch of it is cutoff at the bottom and is also the wrong scale for showing the crash site, Northwest Manor (now McGucket's Hootenanny Hut), etc. I still feel like the fold-out Gravity Falls map in "Dipper's and Mabel's Guide to Mystery and Non-stop Fun" is very close simply because the book came out after the series wrapped up and therefore locations and layout were finalized by then. If you zoom into just the area around the Myster Shack on these maps though you can see what I'm talking about:

In the example here you can see that the Tent of Telepathy was established as being close to the Mystery Shack early on, but the Gleeful Auto Sales on these maps is in the wrong spot, not shown, or in the last example shown in the correct layout along with their house adjacent.

So why don't I just suck it up and use the last map? Well, like i said, a bunch of locations are covered up with Mabel's writing, and in all honesty, the first map, while not accurate is MUCH higher quality, even though a lot of places are in the wrong location.

So with athat in mind... there's two things I want to identify here: 1) Does anyone who frequents the forum here know of any efforts to organize a definitive layout of the Gravity Falls area. Not necessarily in a fancy map but even in a simple black and white grid layout, showing where places are located relative to eachother? 2) Does anyone know from there are keeners in the community here that could help with making a definitive map, of the sort shown in the first colourful image? I'm not a graphic design artist and am pretty slow, but I know enough that if I had to I can modify the first one and make it into what I want... it would just be painfully slow and I'd rather move on to game design ;)

Thanks for reading my long post and any suggestions/help you can lend!

~BGB (YPV SZBA YVM!) 