Razed Street, Adept (Patreon)

Hi Adepts! This week's map is the Razed Street (30x30), and your alternate version is a lightly snowy version, similar to the Snowy Night version of the Forest Pond. In this one, I've swapped out most of the ash and soot for snow drifts, with some snow effects layered on top to help express the visibility you could expect here. I haven't made any snowy urban maps before, but I think this is a step in that direction. If there's interest, maybe for May's revisited post, I can experiment with making an old urban map fully snow-covered.  Let me know!

1. For city maps, the rough sketch is only good for fitting the buildings together and getting a feel for where the alleys will be, and maybe also for feeling out what kinds of roofs they might have. I think that's different from non-urban maps because props such as trees, rocks, and ledges are more important to place in interesting ways for individual cover. Buildings are great for blocking sight and creating big, blocky obstacles, but they don't make for the most varied combats. Obviously the ruined and burnt buildings are much better for offering a variety of cover, but you know, typically. 

2. This map ended up being layer practice more than anything else, with plenty of mixups along the way. On top, we have the roofs, with big ol' holes just for flavor and depth. Those holes really tripped me up, I could not for the life of me remember them when shading and I had to keep going back to touch them up. Under the roofs are the ruined walls, then the rubble, then the ash and soot, and then the floorboards, and then the cobblestones. 

Part of this map's difficulty was getting across the dirtiness of the ruins without over-filling the map with details. The last thing I ever want to do is overcomplicate a map enough that the eye doesn't know what to make of it, and since my normal city maps often get close to that line, this one had to toe it even closer due to being a step more intricate than those by design.

3. I had to resist every urge to blast this map with color, like my normal stuff. I still got some splashes in there, but I kept reigning myself in since I felt that a devastated street probably should feel a little more grungy than my typical city map. The biggest contributor to that vibe is probably the rubble scattered around, but the ashy rooftops and soot-covered streets fill in the gaps nicely. Still, be aware that if you start digging into the PSD you'll have to overcome a few of my color effects which I've blasted to hell and back, I had a bit of trouble nailing the colors for this one and I kinda salted the earth in there. Despite all that, a pretty nice map I think!