Tropical Ruins

Hiya, I'm back again a little later than usual due to the holidays, but this one is the Tropical Ruins (35x40)! This little chunk of shoreline seems pretty isolated but it's full of strange ruins for your party to investigate and probably fight over. I'd bet rival archaeologists are here to stake out their claim before any adventurers can loot any of the good stuff, so I guess you'd better beat them up or something!

 1. Soo, originally I was planning on this being a whole series of ledges with the ruins located on the last tier, which were also initially supposed to be a bit more elaborate. Oh and also the original sketch was bigger than this as you can guess by how the island on the bottom is cut off. Due to the holidays I was very short on time this last week so I eventually had to make this bad boy much smaller than I had originally planned- somewhere around 40x50. That was very ambitious, as it turned out, because even when I reduced the scale I found myself several days behind schedule.. again because of the holidays.

Btw, I hope you had a good Thanksgiving (if you're in a country that celebrates it)! I usually host dinner and do the bulk of the cooking for my parents, siblings, and their children so it was a very very busy week, but since I do the cooking I usually champion the opinion that turkey isn't very good and instead prepare a big ol' ham. Highly recommend it, spiralized ham is waaay easier to cook and much much much tastier. Also, stuffing is insanely tasty. And mashed potatoes. Honestly Thanksgiving has to be my second favorite holiday after Halloween. Anyway, on with map talk!

 2. Again I took another pass at revising my rock walls. This time is a variation of what I did in the last map where I added more contour lines and fewer (zero) detail lines. I thought this style would better imply greater height due to the increased contouring lines while not being too busy or overcomplicated with the absence of extra details. That's all well and good, I think it looks pretty good, but it took me so extremely long to draw that it has utterly ruined my release schedule in a month where I plan on taking time off for the holidays.

I spent so much time drawing, erasing, and redrawing the one long rock wall that I wasted at least 2 additional days working on only that, which is why I also ended up cutting the other ledges and the real reason why it's overall way smaller than planned. A bummer of a map, for sure. I'm going to have to get myself back on schedule somehow after this and that means 1 to 2 simple maps which I can knock out in a few days. So just so you know, that's the reasoning behind the next few maps you'll see here.

 3. Remember when I was so pumped about the palette for my last map? Turns out it doesn't look quite as good when 2/3s of the map isn't water- it sorta throws off the look of the palette. So, that meant I needed to do lots of tweaking, which put me even further behind schedule. I think I got there.. eventually.. maybe.. but this is starting to scare me off of making more tropical maps, I just need to get away from here I think.