Geopolitical Dodecahedron

todo find and upload picture!

The theme of Ludum Dare 
this weekend is 
small worlds.

I started to brainstorm
about how to make a small
version of the earth,
for a game or similar.

That made me
mistreat geography
and draft a
twelve-sided globe
mainly with land-mass.

The idea was
to use it for a
geo-political historical
incremental game.

Too big a task,
which I quickly abandoned.
But the globe geography
still feels interesting.

These were the regions:

- Europe
- Russia
- Africa
- China
- Middle-East + South Asia
- Antarctica + Australia
- USA + Mexico
- Arctic + Canada
- South America
- Sea: Eastern Siberia
- Sea: Atlantic
- Sea: Pacific

Each can be drawn within a pentagon,
and combined to a dodecahedron globe.

This is the graph of neighbours / 
overview of the map:


            Arctic + Canada
         _.~'  _~  |  ~_  '~._
     _.~'    _~    |    ~_    '~._
-- USA -- Sea --  EU -- Rus.-- Sea -- ..
   / \    / \    / \    / \    / \
      \  /   \  /   \  /   \  /   \ /
.. -- S.A.-- Afr.-- M.E.-- Chn.-- Sea --
      '~._   ~_     |     _~   _.~' 
          '~._ ~_   |   _~ _.~'
          Antarctic + Australia


The map is schewed 
and mostly land mass.
It still looks 
very earth-like.

Geography is wrong,
but it is a nice structure
geographical-relative
political segments,
for a game and similar.

It might be useful for a
visualisation some day.
It could be interesting
to create as a dice.
And it was fun to make :)

---

I also did a quick
physical prototype
of cardboard and paper
with free-hand geographical drawing
to see what it would feel like.

Of course the real intention
would be to generate it in 3D 
with real map data
displaced to fit the model.

Notice the displacements
and difference in scale,
while the map still 
kind of makes sense...

For example, in the real world: 
Europe is 1/4 the size of Africa.