Village Hall, Adept (Patreon)

Hello again, Adepts! This week's map is the Village Hall (25x25), depicting a small town's gathering hall. I made sure to make this one distinctly different than the Town Hall map I made back in October, but I realize that the designs are still somewhat similar. I can only assume that that similarity is there because this is just what I feel like a town hall looks like? 

Anyway, your alternate version of this map is Foggy! This one features some heavy fog drifting in towards the hall, no doubt obscuring the approach of some ghastly ghouls or spooky specters, who somehow have been drawn to attack the villagers who now huddle for safety in the village hall! Perhaps some nearby necromancer is the blame for this undead hoard, or maybe the villagers have disturbed a nearby graveyard, breaking some ward that was keeping the dead from rising again? 

Oh! And as an additional bonus, I prepared some renders of the village hall isolated as PNGs! You'll find them in the Isolated file, just the building plus the roof with both day and night lighting, as well as isolated, outlines-only versions in the Outlines file. Enjoy!

1. I actually had a surprisingly hard time sketching the exterior of this map, finding it difficult to lay out a satisfying village map that seems to use the hall as its centerpoint, especially since I wanted to keep the frame somewhat small (in order to keep focus on the hall). In the end, I settled on this layout with a wide road circling around the hall, which at least implies that the villagers use this area as a thoroughfare if not for the hall then due to the market stalls. 

The hall itself was a different puzzle. I wanted it to be just a single floor, partially because I'm lazy (multiple floors makes for complicated layer management in Photoshop, I already had a roof to deal with), and partially because it felt a little like overkill for a little village like this to have an expansive gathering hall when it really just needs a handful of rooms. 

2. Outlines! Knowing that this was likely to be a long and tricky map to make, since I'd be messing around with drawing both interior and exterior spaces, I made sure to start out by reusing whatever assets I could early on, and filling the rest after I knew what still needed to be done. Mostly, this left me with various props inside the hall, as well as additional rooftops and props outside, but the biggest task was drawing the roof, which is one of the biggest I've drawn yet. Honestly, it wasn't the hardest map to draw, just a somewhat repetitive one that required a lot of mindless busywork and detailing.  But that's the job sometimes, not everyone can be a giant skeleton or crystal-filled cavern. 

3. I, once again, took some swings with the colors of this map. This time I tried out a more yellowish palette, which feels a little more sunset-y. Sometimes, after spending a while coloring and shading a map, I like to step away from my desk for an hour or two and come back with fresh eyes, seeing the map like the first time again. This helps show me if I'm leaning too hard into a color or going too extreme with the lighting/shading. This week I tried this out and found that I wasn't enjoying how greenish the map was feeling, so I grabbed some sliders and moved things around, finding that a more yellowish palette felt more natural to me. And you know what, I half-expect that I'll come back in a few days and change my mind once again, but it felt right at the time and maybe this time it'll stick!