Gardener's Hut, Adept

This week's map is the Gardener's Hut (15x13), a small house with a unique layout that was inspired by Hagrid's Hut, at least aesthetically- from what I can tell the inside of his house (in the movies of course) is pretty bare bones and a little too cramped to make for a good map so I took some liberties to make it a little bigger and a bit more exciting. Giant pumpkins are non-negotiable however, those gotta stay.

 1. So, initially, I was planning on this being a lot more rough than Hagrid's Hut, aiming more for a hermit's shack. The walls were going to be very ramshackle stone or wood and the little building wasn't even going to be accessible from the main one, the floor was going to be cobblestone or, more likely, dirt. I moved on from these plans pretty quickly though, it seemed pretty obvious to me that a cozy brick house with a cute pumpkin patch would likely make for a much cooler map than a dirty hut.

 2. Lots of interesting shapes in this map, very different than the usual building maps. I tried out a more organic stone wall around the garden which, as you might guess by looking at it, was a lot more work to detail than a simple wooden gate on account of all the little details that required personal attention. The house was an interesting challenge for two reasons- the octagonal shape is tricky to fill with props in a way that makes sense, things that would usually go in corners are more out in the middle of the room, and the way the whole octagon is crooked. I rotated the building to an odd angle because I thought it make the map feel more organic, but it messed with my head more than I expected, I often got confused about the layout and orientation of the props since nothing was at a clear right angle to anything else. It was an unexpected challenge to wrap my head around.

 3. While I would have liked to make this a Halloween map outright, I thought that, since it's another isolated building png, I better keep it to the established 'regular' palette for my maps so it could easily be laid down over many of my other maps without clashing too much. This hasn't been a huge concern for the building pngs, but I still have tried to keep the palette somewhat grounded at least for the base versions of the maps for this reason.

Gotta say, this map has really started giving me that itch to make Halloween maps again.. drawing pumpkins was a lot of fun. Maybe a ridiculously large pumpkin that's been made into a house? I haven't drawn a gigantic skull in a while either, those are some of my favorites- maybe a huge spiky demon skull that's being used as a goblin camp? That's the good stuff.