Snowy Street, Adept (Patreon)

I'm back again! My goodness, what a busy time of year. I can hardly believe I'm still making one map a week, time is flying by. But even so, your map this week is the Snowy Street (30x30), my first winter city map! And, since it seemed like it could be fun, I made a Sandy version as your alternate variant, making the map feel like an abandoned town which is slowly being covered by sandstorms. Kinda niche, maybe, but interesting!

1. Oh no, I saved over my initial sketch! Yikes, it's been a while since I've done that. Well, fortunately I didn't change anything much in the overall layout from the outset, so everything is essentially the same. I wanted the layout to feel somewhat circular, with a path cutting through each of the corners of the map, straightforward and simple. Many of you have expressed interest in more simple maps recently, so I'm trying to take that to heart with layouts which aren't over-designed. 

2. The outlines here should have been straightforward as well, but I decided to start thinking about things just as I finished them. I had the thought that maybe it's time to redesign my roofs to be a bit less over-detailed, cutting down on the unnecessarily detailed roof tiles and maybe implying them instead with more subtle lines. I tried out a few new designs, taking inspiration from Dungeon Mapster and 2-Minute Tabletop (check them out if you haven't already, they're a few of my personal favorite mapmakers), but I made the decision to move ahead with my existing roofs for the sake of time. Next time I make a city map I'll be trying some things out, just you wait and see.

3. Coloring this was a little interesting, a fun twist on my usual city colors. It was a bit tricky, especially when deciding just how saturated everything out to be, but I felt that being a little subdued adds to the wintery vibe of the map, especially with extra vibrant blue over everything to wrap it all together. I might have overdone it with the paper texture somewhat, but overall I think the colors are fairly balanced despite the orange roofs being a lil too vibrant near the edges of the frame perhaps. 

Will the next snowy city map have colors that look like this? Probably not, but it will absolutely be based off of this!