Thanks for the encouraging words! Thought I'd talk a little bit more about how I got to this point. First thing I did was try to layout all the geography-the water features and the mountains, since they'd be the immovable elements that the city would have to develop around. It took a little while to try to sort out how to fit in a harbor, inlet, sea, and strait but I'm happy with this configuration. Who the hell knows what a mini ocean is, all I had to go off of was that it once "flooded half the town" so I figure it should be pretty centrally located..and to make more deserving of being called an ocean, it's got a sandy beach. Eventually I'm going to create a topographic layer so the mountains and cliffs will be seen in relief.
Then came roughly figuring out where the major routes and neighborhoods would be. It's kind of amazing that with maybe ~500 Newbridge related calls, the roads on the map now are almost all that are specifically named on the show. And all the call outs on the map now are all of the places that are mentioned with any kind of context on where they are located. So like I said, there's a lot of room for making stuff up. Once I got the main arterial road network drawn out, time to start putting all the stuff in between the roads...homes and shorter streets and businesses and other points of interest. Before I got very for a long, like with the geographic features, I thought it best to draw out the larger places-the colleges, the commons, airport, zoo..now I'm moving on to the schools and sports venues. That seemed the smartest way to go, start with the biggest things that are hard to plop down just anywhere and then work your way towards the smaller buildings that are easy to find a place for.
A couple of "head canon" type things that helped dictate some of my choices. I thought the early settlement would have a strong Quaker influence, Quakers are mentioned more than a few times on the show and the time period works nicely with maybe a group of Quakers setting out to start their own town. So the Quaker Museum is a central piece in the botanical gardens and prominently positioned in relation to the mayor's house and along the long line of sight going down Gorntner Street, the way cities like Paris or Washington DC would design streets that guide your eye and travel towards monuments or important sites. In the gardens, the 8-pointed star made by the walking paths is a Quaker symbol, again inspired by the Freemason symbology in Washington DC. Speaking of Gorntner Street, that name is mentioned a couple times and I like to think it might be the name of one of the early settlers, so there's Mount Gorntner, Gorntner Creek, Gorntner Circle and Street. Monster Island where the penitentiary is was created as an homage to a Simpsons joke where people are punished by being sent to Monster Island but someone reassures those sentenced that, "It's just a name". Upon arriving and being chased by monsters they learn that "it's just a name" because it's actually a peninsula. So there was that, and a peninsula made more sense for easy access and to explain how so many prisoners were able to escape.
