Flooded Grotto, Adept (Patreon)

3I'm back again with a new one, the Flooded Grotto (25x30), a waterlogged cave with just a single piece of solid ground. What's that? You'd prefer a something a little more safe and dry? Tough luck, bub. Just wait till you find out what's in that water, you'll be thanking me for that single measly patch of dirt. 

Anyway, I'm sick and my energy is flagging rapidly, so let's keep this succinct. Your alternate version is Swampy- starring green and brown. If I had to say one thing about this variant, it would be that it's different from the original in several ways.

1. Sketch! I knew time was going to be weird with the holidays approaching, so I set aside my over-complicated sketches and set out to make something achievable. I think I had 3 days to make this one before family came into town for the holidays, and somehow I felt that a cave was something I could make in that time.

2. Of course, I set out thinking I could just grab bits of my most recent cave maps and stitch them together to make the walls here. However, I have inadvertently painted myself into a corner here, because the way I draw the walls makes them truly obnoxious to reuse for future maps. So obnoxious that it isn't even worth the time to make it work. This is because I split it into 2 parts, the walls which I want to interact with the interior lighting, and the cutout on top, which I want to be static darkness. And of course they are split into 2 distinct layers and must stay distinct from each other for the sake of being easily and quickly isolated when needed. In short, I will never make a new cave map in a single day, like I could potentially do with forest maps. And that's fine, I suppose, I just need to remember that in the future.

3. Still figuring out the lighting and colors for these cave maps. I think I'm getting somewhere, but it's hard to tell. This time I leaned into the blues, since the map is primarily water and I wanted it to feel a little muggy, but I'm not 100% sure what I would do if it wasn't mostly water. I think I've got a lot of work to do here, and the next cave I make might not look at all similar to this (sorry).