Island Hut, Adept (Patreon)

Hello Adepts! This week's map is the Island Hut (30x30), and I whipped up a version of it without the hut for you so you do whatever you need to do with this island. And, of course, I also made a night version of the Modest Island, so you'll have appropriate lighting for when you cram every inch of this place with pirate ghosts, which I highly recommend. 

1. As always when I'm designing an island, I like to make sure there's a flow to the layout, a path that players can take to the peak. Since this island is occupied, I wanted to make doubly sure to express that this place is someone's home and there's a clear path that this resident can take from the bottom to the top. It might have been interesting to make a horribly rock island filled with tiers and ledges with little house on top, but I can't imagine wanting to live there.

That said, I tried to spice up the layout with somewhat interesting terrain, but the possibilities get a little limited when I'm trying to keep the island framed in a reasonably-sized canvas. Usually I wouldn't mind making an island map enormous, but when interiors are involved I like to keep the scale somewhat smaller so that the building doesn't get lost in the rest of the details. 

2. These days I don't even bat an eye when I realize I'm going to make myself draw endless lengths of rock walls. I still get very tired of drawing them, but I guess I can't help but design maps with lots of interesting wiggly rocky walls, so what else can I do but get to work?

Fortunately, once I was finished with that, I could take bits and pieces from several other maps so I could spend the rest of my time focusing on the hut. Mostly, I grabbed trees, bushes, and rocks from the Jungle Basin, which used some fairly fresh assets I had drawn recently. With that done, the hut was surprisingly quick work, though in hindsight it shouldn't surprise me- it's a 3x4" one room structure with about 5 props inside. Honestly, the ease that it came together makes me think that making interiors for some of my previously made city maps might be more achievable than I thought (I'm still working on that. I know I made some promises a while ago, and I'm still trying to find a way to fit such a project into my schedule).

3. I haven't made an island map in some time, apparently so long that I hadn't yet revised my tropical palette. I think the last one I made was the Sea Cliffs, though you could make an argument for the Sailing Ship, and looing back, I realized that I would probably have to start from scratch with the colors and effects. I think the biggest change that needed to be made was the lighting, specifically the 'glare', which was washing out the colors and made the map feel kinda faded. Recently I've been leaning toward more crisp lighting with a few glowy effects on top to help set the ambiance of the map, so I tried to imitate the lighting  of the Roadside Watchtower with a few changes to really emphasize the colors of the grass and water. 

I think it came out fairly nice, but I'll probably look at it again in a day or two and feel like the lighting is too bright or the shadows aren't blue enough or the grass isn't green enough, but that's life.