City Fighting Pit, Adept (Patreon)

Hello Adepts! This week's map is the City Fighting Pit (30x30), and your alternate version is with lit night lighting! I imagine that this will be a nice version for big night fights, the arena crawling with people looking to watch a good fight and the stalls selling all kinds of fried garbage- I imagine it's like going to a monster truck rally. 

1. I wanted to keep the layout for this one simple, just a pit with stands and some buildings nearby. I liked the idea of a smallish arena, not a colosseum for big gladiatorial battles but rather a reasonably-sized fighting pit in the city- maybe versatile enough that local troupes use it for shows when there aren't any fights scheduled.

As with all my other city maps, I like to try to keep them somewhat similar in design, and usually that means including some amount of trees/bushes/grass around the edges of buildings. I think this gives city maps a little identity with a somewhat pleasant vibe, and additionally, I really like the little bit of contrast the greens add against the buildings and cobblestone.

You'll also notice that I managed to avoid using any large circles, a rare treat that saved me a lot of effort (circles suck). 

2. Outlines! The buildings this week were cobbled together from the largest chunk I could salvage from Cluttered Warehouse's roofs. I wasn't feeling the clay roof tiles I occasionally use, so I stuck with the basic slats. I actually came at this with a bit more strategy than usual, setting up roof patterns for each size of building I intended to make: 1 square from the roof's apex, 1.5 squares, 2 squares, 2.5 squares. This made the buildings much easier to quickly assemble, and in the end I actually had the foresight of exporting the texture as a PNG for future use. 

Speaking of which, the cobblestone texture used this week was a PNG I had set up a while ago which I'm massively grateful to have on hand- another enormous time saver. It's little things like that that allow me to make a new map every week.

1. Slowly but surely I'm figuring out city lighting. I don't think I've gotten it right yet, but I've gotten pretty close on past attempts- particularly City Gates strikes me as one of the better ones, but I'm not quite convinced that the reason I like it so much isn't because of the nice contrast that huge amount of grass and trees added. Rocky Harbor was another nice attempt, but similarly all the water was great for offsetting the gray cobblestone. Either way, I do think I'm improving nearly every time, but I'm not nearly satisfied yet.