Desert Streets, Adept (Patreon)

1. I'm back! This week's map is the Desert Streets (40x30), a series of flat-topped roofs and alleys filled with a somewhat bustling collection of market stalls. By design it's a nicely basic desert city street, simple and vanilla enough that it should ideally be just what you and your players imagine from this environment- more or less Tatooine with more palm trees and wagons.

1. Something I've often struggled with when designing cities is the clutter, and part of that is how the building layout adds to the feeling of clutter. I enjoy the feeling of a bustling city map so clutter is necessary, but at some point I go a little too far and that turns into a map that feels jumbled and unplanned. For this map I decided to start off with a building layout that's built to seem at least a little intentional, with the facades of many of the buildings on the main streets lining up cleanly. I think this helped keep the map from feeling too unintentionally scattered and will probably be something I continue to work on the in the future. 

Another thing you might notice here is how many little changes I made between this stage and the next, buildings mirrored, nudged, and altered to not have staircases any more. I felt that the layout was feeling too over-designed, so I randomized a few things in an attempt to make the map feel less like it was designed in an hour by some dude.

2. One thing I was a little worried about here for the outlines was the low-detail design of all these buildings- they're just squares with a few craggy little details for texture. I kept telling myself that that's fine for these kinds of buildings, but still it felt very wrong, like I was intentionally leaving them unfinished. I made myself feel better by looking up pictures of the buildings on Tatooine and imagining how simple those would look from above. 

Also, this is the stage at which I usually add props and come up with little stories in my head for the different locations in the map. One of my favorite details of this map is the little cafe to the east of the fountain with roof and street seating, it feels like a recipe for some interesting encounters or combat setups. I would actually like to see an encounter based on this map because of this part of it, I feel like it would be a really fun watch!

3. Tell you what, I really was planning on making some major changes to the colors after my last desert map, and I actually did start off with a very different palette, and then I tweaked some adjustment layers, added a few more highlights here and there, and wouldn't you know, the colors ended up eerily similar to those of the Desert Gates. It honestly wasn't intentional, I barely even color-picked from Desert Gates, but I guess this is the palette I'm finding myself gravitating towards. 

My thoughts? I don't know, I think this environment has to be fairly monotone, so I have to fit in extra colors when I can with the market stalls and trees, but still it feels a bit too flat for my taste. I tried using more drastically different colors for the streets/buildings but that was an obvious miss, so I think I just have to learn to like this look.