Witch's Ruins, Adept (Patreon)

Welcome back! This week's map is the Witch's Ruins (25x25), and as you may notice I've set up the alternate versions to match up with the Misty Boneyard from a few weeks back. Going into this map I wanted the regular 'spooky' version to be similar in style to the Boneyard, which I thought had an excellent eerie atmosphere to it, and while I was at it I figured I might as well make it so all the versions match up somewhat, though with a few tweaks I've added to the lighting and shading. 

1. In the main post I mentioned that I worked with James Webster again on this one, and since we have to be on the same page from the beginning for our collaborations we started by brainstorming appropriately Halloween-y ideas that also weren't overdone. We landed on a ruined village with lots of burnt down buildings and an intact witch's hut in the center. I liked how it told a bit of a story while also being vague enough to leave room for people to write it into their stories as need be. 

I think I would set up the witch as a friendly old woman with lots of witch-y defenses guarding her village and hut, but she's not necessarily evil (just paranoid). Or maybe the hut is being attacked by angry villagers, and once she's saved she asks your help setting up defenses for the villagers when they return (and one of the components she needs for a protective spell is located in the Misty Boneyard). 

2. Since we were planning on finishing this map and posting it on Halloween, I had 1 less day to work on it than I typically give myself. Unfortunately, there aren't a lot of props and pieces of this one that I could snatch from past maps, which translated to a few late nights as I drew up piles of rubble and ruined buildings. The rest was fairly stock, I grabbed the leafless trees from last year's Halloween map and cleaned up their outlines a fair amount to get them up to snuff, and the rest of the trees came from my most recently updated batch I drew for the Jungle Camp. 

3. I mentioned that I wanted this map to pair well with the Misty Boneyard, which, as it turned out, was a little trickier than I expected. When setting up a map's lighting and effect I like to keep things freeform, adding and tweaking as I go, typically without following any sort of pattern and instead fixing whatever is bothering me the most until I'm satisfied. Unfortunately, when I make a map with a different setting than usual that means that I take very roundabout ways of reaching the same goal- upping brightness early on and later bringing it down by adding more shadows. The end result is a thick coating of filters and layers that completely mask the original colors I had intended on using and make imitating its style more difficult than it should be. I think I got the right idea with the Witch Ruins though, but not a perfect imitation. Still, looks good!