Castle Courtyard, Adept (Patreon)

Hello again, everyone! This week your map is the Castle Courtyard (40x40), or more accurately the Castle Bailey as I've recently learned. I started this map with a little bit of research and quickly discovered that the prompt for this map was a little vague, as I was finding several possible directions to take this map in. In the end, I decided to go with my original intention for the map, but I'm still planning on developing those other ideas as well, seeing as some of you who voted for this map in the poll probably were imagining something else as well. I'll whip up a sketch for one of those maps, but I'll have to determine whether or not I could realistically make it by this weekend. We'll see!

Moving on- your alternate version of this map is a spooky Foggy version! I feel like I make foggy maps a lot these days, but I just love the image of players either taking advantage of the fog to attempt to stealthily remove the guards from the walls, or defend the walls from creatures as they emerge from the mist (such as zombies, eldritch abominations, goblins in leather). 

1. I had a hell of a time designing this map. I tend to give myself rules when starting a map, whether I realize it or not, and this time I decided that the final map would need to have large towers, 10' wide walls, lots of roofs built onto the walls, and a castle/palace implied to the side of the image. I feel like probably could have taken it easy on some of the roofs, but I just had in my head that all of these were 100% required elements of the map, so I did it anyway. 

I ended up changing a lot of smallish details as I went along- adding height to the stairs up the walls, shrinking the towers to better match the size of the walls, rearranging the fountain to feel a little cleaner, and tweaking the area outside of the wall to be a little more interesting. It took me a shockingly long time to get out of the early stages of this map, just because there felt like I needed to hash out the way that different parts of the map related to each other and filled the space. 

2. And it was at this point that I got completely overwhelmed by this map. Between detailing all of the walls, placing all of the roofs, and deciding the texture of the walls and ground both inside and outside the walls, I couldn't make myself make any decisions. My biggest issue was figuring out how I was going to color the walls differently from the ground in the courtyard. 

Originally I imagined the courtyard being cobblestone, but I realized that that would probably look way too similar to the stone walls. My next idea was to fill the courtyard with stone tiles/bricks, but I hate how they tend to hide the gridlines. So, I settled for plain-ol dirt- not the most fun or most interesting way to take it, but I needed to keep moving. In hindsight, I think I should have tried a little shade of cobblestone, which might have been a little blinding but might also have felt more 'castley'. 

3. I started coloring using the Village Drawbridge as a starting point, feeling that since they had similar props (big stone walls and dirt roads). What I forgot was that, since I had made that map, I have taken some big steps in changing the way I color maps like these. The end result was just way too washed out and a little plain compared to the more vibrant and colorful palette I've been working with since then. I started over using the Village Shrine as a starting point and found I was much happier with the result.

Also, side note, as I was writing this (just moments before I will be posting these posts here on Patreon), I noticed that I never shaded the tiny little rock wall in the bottom left corner.. I'm not going to go back and fix it. The thought of re-rendering all the different versions of this map, repackaging them in their files, and reuploading everything to Patreon is so painful to me that I'm going to go ahead and claim that that rock wall is so small and gradual that it doesn't cast a shadow- a first for my maps. Spread the word.