This page is in shambles right now as I have so many maps and flagsNEW it'll take a while to properly scale, title and describe them.
NationStates is a text-based game and website in which users can create their own nation, set a flag, capital city and some other stuff after certain time milestones and solve issues by choosing one of prefered policies. Those policies affect dozens of statistics that makes up the classification of the nation's government, from Inoffensive Centrist Democracy to Psychotic Dictatorship.
The base game is pretty static, solving issues gets boring as you can't really build up your nation, you can just indirectly tweak up or down some arbitrary statistics, that don't make that much sense. The population number of the nation grows up every day by 1 million people if the nation is active at least once a 14 days. There is also a global organization, World Assembly where the nation can join and vote on various issues, even though they don't affect the nation's statistics at all.
The main selling point of NationStates however are regions. A nation can join one of the thousands of regions, that are groups of other players that can together role-play as multinational organization. Built-in regional forum can facilitate some simple role-plays, but the real advanced ones are using offsite apps, mostly Discord.
My first nation in NationStates was Tomeksovia, founded in 2013, and I didn't care about role-plays, just wanted my own website with my own flag and stuff. Every nation has a subpage with factbooks, articles that can be written in BBCode and able to simulate suprisingly complex semi-webpages that can mimic nation's Wikipedia.
All my NationStates projects are discontinued since September 2022 and all assigned NS nations cease to exist.
Assigned nation in NationStates: Tomeksovia (formerly)
You see, the account on NationStates was first, and was called 'Tomeksovia'. After I revived that account for a bit I decided to make a map of that virtual state. I've made some drafts and I thought that the heart shaped map ('Corasa' is distorted word of 'Heart' in Spanish 'Corazon') is the best so I put those in Tomeksovia's NationStates factbooks and didn't bother to change names or something. Not confusing at all.
Corasa Island and part of a nearby continent at the north
That map was my first successful attempt of digitalizing the contour map drawn on paper, scanned and vectorized with GIMP.
Corasa Island Road Map with other points of entry
I don't even remember how I drew those roads and lines, I guess I used combination of MS Paint (without layers) and GIMP (with layers which was the main selling point for me). Funny how such a relatively small country have two spaceports lol. Most of the cities didn't have a label but some of them were actually named, but since the map wasn't that useful, those names were used in another, much larger worldbuilding project, which was New Volica, and later on Volican States.
Assigned nation in NationStates: New Volica (formerly)
For the sake of clarity (or not) I will try to call all the pitcher shaped island nation maps "Velka Volica", as the name "New Volica" was fully assigned to the two fingers shaped peninsula nation that is a member of Volican States. And I will fail at that because all those maps are signed "New Volica" so...
Velka Volica Islands - New Volica's first version
After I abandoned Tomeksovia for a couple of years, I missed NationStates for a while and started new state: New Volica. This time around I made much more sophisticated maps as they were not rely on GIMP layers, but Inkscape one.
Velka Volica Road Map
Velka Volica Public Transport Systems Map
Velka Volica Administrative Division Map
Velka Volica Airports Map
Velka Volica Public Transport Simple Map
Velka Volica Skyscrapers Map
Assigned nations in NationStates: New Volica, Old Volica, Tomeksovia, Volica
During the time of stay at home covid period, I got hooked into cobuilding a fictional world of Estia within the roleplay of Assembly of Nations. It used to be a leading roleplay of the region of The Leftist Assembly in NationStates.net and hosted on discord. For about a year I've become a leading cartographer of the planet of Estia and that made me to draw a bunch of various maps with Inkscape, learning some basics of QGIS and writing a staggeringly and unnecessarily detailed 130 pages long Factbook about my the most robust worldbuilding project so far, the country of Volican States! I've really enjoyed making maps for that world as well as writing the entire history for it and conduct foreign relations with other people, however my great desire was to develop a truly interactive and alive world maps but I've never acquired enough skills in GIS programs and web technologies to pull this off. The most I could get is to put a static image and wrapping it with leaflet.js and that didn't come without some major annoyances.
Detailed map of Volican States
So far it's my the best looking map (and image in general) made with Inkscape.
Administrative division of Volican States
Volican States was actually meant to be a group of 7 almost completely independent countries that were often hostile to each other. The fragmentation of the land of Volicas was inspired by the real history of Korean Peninsula and the break-up of Yugoslavia. The city of Blisko acted as the capital of all Volican States, even though the status was similar to that of Brussels for European Union, rather than typical federated state capital. The main dividing force of Volica was the conflict between communist Old Volica and capitalist New Volica (yeah it sounds familiar) and the second one was how to pronounce Volica - is the letter 'c' spelled like 'ts' or 'k'?. On Volican Peninsula and nearby, four special administative regions that belonged to foreign countries (my fellow roleplayers Neo Enderion, Enderia, Xelebara and Krat) were also designated as the Volican Peninsula was located in a very strategic "700 km wide strait" between the oceans.
My first complete map of Volica
At first as I wanted to join the Assembly of Nations roleplay, I wanted to embed my already estblished map of New Volica (Velka Volica Islands) into the map of Estia. After my petition get rather negative review I quickly chose the new place for New Volica, resurrected my Tomeksovia NationStates account and added Old Volica, thanks to the very obvious question of my fellow roleplayer Neo Enderion "Old Volica where". In order to speed up my submission to the RP I created that map in one day to show that I am worthy to join and my map making game is strong.
Right after I started to expand the lore of Volica and eventually added more states to Volica, from 3 at the beginning, to 8 states with their own governments, lore and competing interests.
Speeds on railroads of Volica - with only 3 states
Fast and reliable railways were a key to compete economically with train nuts from Neo Enderion, the country with extremely extensive high speed railway network. Unfortunately I haven't done updated map with all the Volican states, and that further confirms the superiority of Neo Enderion, only in this regard of course, we always had better work-life balance and more civil liberties!
Second level administrative division of Volican States
I'm really dissapointed that I never finished this map, I had some issues with paths of second level subdivisions so I gave up adding colors to the provinces, it would look much better. Anyhow, look how cool are the names of provinces are, the capital of Old Volica is Polska in Polska province (yeah).
Position of Volican States on the globe
The distances between the mainland Volica and their outlying states are fairly large. That globe was made with QGIS but because the program crashed often when I tried to make the globe with larger resolution, it remained badly pixelated.
Satellite image of Volican States
That satellite image was made before the expansion of Volican States with northern states of Arlavia and Kanalia, before my newer neighbour Ruckya came into play and as well as before my Varla neighbour across the strait made more detailed map with cities. That's why the image is quite empty but I didn't bother to make an updated one. Still, I like that style of the image, poorly executed but kinda charming, made with GIMP.