Stormy Village Square, Adept & Expert (Patreon)

Howdy, Adepts and Experts! Your extra version this week is a stormy adaption of the Village Square. I haven't made an alternate weather version of a map for a while so I figured I was about due, plus I always like making stormy versions of my urban maps for those grungy noir vibes and dramatic combats. Another bonus is that you can add weather effects to your combats such as reduced visibility (easier stealth, harder ranged combat), difficult muddy terrain, or sudden random lighting strikes blinding or stunning those who weren't close enough to be damaged. Lots of interesting changes you can make with nasty weather, I think, so hopefully you all like it!

1. So, the seed for this one was 'Small Village Square' from the last poll I held a couple months back. Seeing as I've already done a Town Square I interpreted this as meaning a small village's square, which brought Breath of the Wild's Kakariko Village to mind, a cute little verdant town with several small gardens dotting the place. It doesn't have a square per se, but I wasn't planning on using it's exact layout anyway (though its layout is really neat actually.. maybe someday).

Seeing as it's a small village, I decided that there would only be a packed dirt road, several thatch roofs as well as tile, and just a little cobblestone well at the crossroads. I wanted to make the layout somewhat random though with small efforts to leave a couple long stretches of open visibility so as to allow for ranged combat, though the well in the center can break line of sight from any stretch of road if you position yourself well.

2. I can honestly say I tried to take my previous rooftops I had drawn from Town Market, but as it turns out I had spiked that well by combining and rasterizing my PSD layers in such a way that made them unusable, or at least enough so that it wouldn't have been worth my while to patch them up. I wasn't completely satisfied with how they turned out anyway, so I can't say I'm too beat up about it. 

The problem with them was how the tiles on the short sides of the building were unbroken straight lines, which looked very unnatural. Something I remember being taught by my grade school art teacher is there are no straight lines in nature, things have curves and bumps. And what I've learned since then is, while unnatural man-made things often have straight lines it's often more believable at a glance if they're a little bumpy or have some chips taken out of them. 

3. Despite this being a fairly common palette for me I actually had a pretty hard time settling on this map's colors. I think my issue was that I rarely mix rooftops and so much grass, they just didn't look right together to me. That's why the grass this week is a little darker and a little less vibrant, to help tie the subdued urban elements and the colorful natural elements together. I'd rather not do that as it will make this map's grass a little different than the grass in my other forested maps (which can lead into each other nicely), but hopefully it's not as noticeable to everyone else as it is to me.