Small Cave, Adept (Patreon)

I return with another map, the Small Cave (25x35)! I've been having a fun time with the recent interest in simpler maps, it's been both a strange design challenge and a pleasant return to more basic themes. I wonder why it's taken me so long to do this?

Your alternate version of this map is Winter, as opposed to the regular, more summer-y version of this map! That, of course, means I've covered the grass with snow, changed the colors to be a little cooler, and tinted the cave to be a lot more frosty. And, as you'll notice, I've also prepared a set of cropped maps of both this and the original version, which feature only the cave. Hopefully this will make the map more generically useful for times when you would rather your cave not be in the forest, instead maybe finding it deep under ground, or connected to the labyrinthine corridors of a profoundly haunted desert tomb, or somewhere inside of a glacier. 

Anyway, I had a lot of fun making this one, so let's talk about it!

1. As you can see, I wasn't quite sure just how simple to make this map, at least when I started sketching it. I left it very basic initially, being intentionally vague so that I could think about what I wanted to place outside the cave while I started drawing the cave walls. 

The cave layout took several iterations, which may be surprising considering how simple it is now. I played around with rock ledges, multiple levels, streams, waterfalls, ponds, bottomless pits, but I thought all of these were over-complicating what was supposed to be a straightforward cave map (though I actually was very close to including a little pool of water in the top right corner). 

2. Yet again, another map which benefits from my new cave-drawing style. This one reads sooo much better than it would have with my previous style, and also would have taken a lot longer to draw/shade. That's because this new way of drawing cave walls is more truncated than before, just implying the height of the walls instead of fully showing them. 

I believe this is the first time I've used this style for outside areas, too, though I feel like I won't always be doing that. I haven't yet figured out how I will add ledges to this style, and also it's not the best at implying great heights. I suppose I'll either have to figure that out eventually or work around that limitation.

3. As for the colors, I once again have iterated on the forest palette I've been using for the Forest Cave Entrance and Forest's Edge. This time around I decided to be a little more extreme with the highlights, which I felt would help lighting up the map enough that the cave could be only slightly darker but feel significantly more shadowy. 

I've been trying to be more aware of the light levels inside my caves, as in the past I've made some which were excessively dark and hard to parse. My recent strategy has been to make the cave about as bright as an outside area but with a few more shadows near the walls, and just to be safe I'll make a JPG of it and see how it looks on my phone, just to ensure that it reads well on multiple screens. It's a little annoying and interrupts the flow of drawing, but inspecting colors on screens with different saturation and contrast levels has prevented me from making some very unreadable maps in the last few months.