Cluttered Alleys, Adept (Patreon)

Hello Adepts! This week's map is the Cluttered Alleys (30x30), a twisting little maze of buildings and cramped alleys, and your alternate version is a Sunset recoloring so you'll always be able to use this map no matter when your party gets mugged while cutting through the city's side streets. 

1. While I didn't have much in mind for this map's layout, I knew that I would need to check certain boxes: labyrinthine streets, crooked buildings, overlapping and jumbled roofs, clear height differences.  I started by drawing a few simple roofs and scattered them around, filling in the blank spaces with whatever I thought would fit and make for interesting paths. Honestly, it was easier to layout than I assumed, maybe because I went into it looking to make a semi-random and poorly planned map. Not every part of the city can be neatly laid-out, right?

2. I started the outlines by drawing some fresh roof tiles with somewhat thicker outlines than previous iterations, then I threw them away because they didn't look good, choosing instead the old classics from previous city maps. I did however make some easy changes to lots of rooftops in order to make them feel a little more detailed and make more sense, but mostly I spent my time stitching together pieces of roof into the proper shapes to fit the rough sketch. 

The sparse grass and trees were late additions, something I wasn't sure I would be adding until late in the game. While they sometimes look like they don't fit too well among the cobblestones, it fills out the blank spaces perfectly and adds just the smallest sense of complexity. 

3. This time around I was planning on doing the colors differently, the last city map I made is one of my worst and it inspired me to do better for the next one. The colors on the rooftops are much more pronounced and contrast well against the cobblestones while also being clearly different from each other roof they're touching. In some places they might be too vibrant, but who doesn't like a little extra color in their life sometimes? I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing, but a couple of roofs are attracting the eye a bit more than they need do I think.