Hedge Maze, Adept (Patreon)

Hello Adepts, this week's map is the Hedge Maze (35x35), one of the most annoying maps I've ever made. By Thursday of this week I was starting to lose my mind as I had just finished drawing the last outline of the last hedge and realized I still needed to draw everything else still, including the small details inside the hedge outlines. At least I had some good audiobooks to listen to, or else I might have started scaling this map down to a more manageable scale. 

Anyway, your extra version of this map is a fun one- I added giant glowing crystals in the center alongside some pretty dramatic lighting! I had quite the list of seasonal props I could place in the center, but most of them felt a little too cliché or overdone, such as pumpkins/one giant pumpkin. Instead, I feel that these crystals still capture the Halloween vibe while also being useful outside of outright Halloween campaigns, which was my intention. 

1. Maze. I used to draw mazes in my notebooks in middle school instead of paying attention in class, which was why I thought I would have a pretty easy time designing a giant maze for a map. It later occurred to me that the map would need to be designed in a way that would be fun to fight in, interesting to explore despite being viewed from above (unlike real hedge mazes), and have objectives so that simply reaching the end wouldn't necessarily complete the map.  So, pretty tricky actually.

2. This one was very annoying to draw, just due to the huge amount of detailing that needed to be done. Normally, when making a map with large amounts of similar props, I would create 3 or 4 standard versions of that prop, duplicate them once or twice, and alter the duplicates somewhat so that they appear different enough from the originals. When dealing with such an enormous amount of hedges however, I felt that placing all of those duplicates and fitting them together might actually be more work than simply drawing everything outright, so I got right to work. 

Also, I decided to stick with the same hedge thickness as with last week's City Park map, 1/2 inch, meaning the passages between are 1/2 inch wide as well. This translates into real space as 2 1/2 feet, which felt about right for a somewhat cramped hedge maze, especially considering that (according to a survey I found) an average American man's shoulder width is about 16 inches. With this in mind, I feel that the maze's dimensions aren't terribly unrealistic, though they might be a little problematic for people used to swinging a great axe around.

3. So, for the basic version of this map I wanted to make sure that the colors were at least somewhat similar to the maze portion of last week's map. That way, you could theoretically lead from that one into this one with few issues. I still felt that the colors could use a little bit of sprucing up though, so I did darken the hedge a little bit more and bump up the vibrancy of the grass somewhat as well. 

Also, I decided to make my life a little easier and take a shortcut on the hedges' shadows and simply duplicate the hedges' color layer, place this new layer below the hedges, slide them down diagonally a little, change the color to blue, and reduce the opacity to 50%. Normally I would draw the shadows by hand, but normally I don't have to draw consistent shadows for endless rows of hedges, so I felt pretty justified here.