Turning The Met Collection Into a Set of Hex Tiles

The Met Collection is one of my favorite sources of public domain art. They have an amazing collection, and their homepage is a pleasure to use. That's why in the past, I have already built a Bluesky bot that posts random images from the collection every day, as well as printed out some of their photos of objects to hang on my wall.

I've also been reading through Mythic Bastionland recently, a big part of which is creating a hex map for the "realm" you'll be playing in. (See the excellent Quinns Quest video everyone is talking about to learn more.)

Naturally, the two things combined in my head and I started experimenting with creating hex tiles from pieces from the collection. To honor my promise to the club to publish something every week this summer, I decided to release a very, very early first version of the resulting set of tiles. Let's call it version 0.1

The Met Collection Hex Tiles v0.1 by Jonas-Merlin Schumacher

Hex tiles for Hex Kit

An Experiment For Now

Right now, this is more of an experiment than a usable set, not only because it contains just six tiles. The biggest problem is finding paintings that make for readable tiles when scaled down. It's remarkable how much you can improve things by simply moving the image around or scaling and cropping it a bit differently. But it takes a lot for a painting to make for an icon you can glance at and know what it represents. Either a dominant color or a very simple representation helps, but so far, I have found few paintings that fit this bill (and not even all six that are included here fit the bill).

Also, I'm still getting to grips with Affinity Designer's selection tool, which has left a few graphical artifacts in the tiles so far. So for the next version, I'll have to revisit all tiles anyway.

The OSR Is Black (Dead) and White (Also Dead)

I'm planning a black and white version as well, though, and from early tests I can already tell that the many sketches of scenery the Met collection contains will make for a far more usable set.

Hex Kit Is Dead As Well

I have created the tiles to work with Hex Kit , which is a good tool that seems to be, sadly, at least as dead as the OSR.

It still technically works, and you can still pay $15 for it if you want (I did). But the documentation has been taken offline and I had a very hard time finding out how to create my own tiles that work well with it.

I'm still not 100% sure how to do it, to be honest. But once I am, I will create a tutorial on the process. And I really think there might be a place for a new, supported hex map tool out there...