City Hall Square, Adept (Patreon)

Hello Adepts! This week's map is the City Hall Square (30x30), and your alternate version is a subdued palette swap! And, before someone brings it up, I know I mentioned that I would work on a winter version as my first snowy urban map- it's going to take more time than I thought, so I'm planning on releasing it as August's Revisited post. If it goes well, I'll try to also revisited another urban map, but I'm not going to make any promises.

Anyway, let's talk about this one!

1. Ok, so the idea for this map is that it offers a much more open area in an urban setting, which is great for ranged combat and not so great if you're looking for any cover. With that in mind, I wanted most of the map to feature the square itself, and unfortunately that meant that I wasn't going to be able to include any entire buildings. This is something I usually try to avoid since people typically like to be able to cut behind buildings and hide in alleys in city combat, but I couldn't fit all of that in without making the map enormous (which I was planning on doing, but my week went a little sideways).  

2. I've been trying to make more interesting roofs for my last couple city maps, ones that include windows and flat tops for more fun terrain. At this rate, I've assembled a pretty nice array of different rooftops that I can somewhat easily import to a map with only a few touchups. I do think that I'll have to start considering drawing fresh roof tiles, maybe with more diverse shapes, but I didn't feel like that was necessary for this map considering how little of the roofs you can actually see. I'm not really looking forward to doing that though, I've had many unsuccessful attempts at making roofs that are detailed but not too eye-catching, but I'm not quite ready to give up on it. 

3. I still haven't figured out city coloring. I want them to be colorful, but the rooftops throw me off every time with their big patches of solid color. I think I need to experiment with more subdued rooftop colors in contrast to the rest of the props, though I really would rather not intentionally work in unexciting colors to my typical palette. Alternately I can try to balance the lighting a little differently so that it hits the rooftops in a way that doesn't draw the eye to them, but that sounds like it would take a lot of extra time. Welp, I'm sure I'll figure it out someday.