Lighthouse Ruins, Adept

This week's map is the Lighthouse Ruins (40x40), a rare island map with a spooky theme (as I warned we'd eventually return to)! That's great, but sometimes you would rather your islands remain free of undead so your alternate version of this one is tropical instead of haunted, perhaps more fitting if you're planning on taking a vacation here rather than fighting off pirate ghosts.

 1. Well, the day has come. I have officially gone far enough back in these premade paternity maps that I barely remember making them. And to clarify, I'm not releasing them in order of when they were made, I'm more going off of vibes, and this map was made in October of last year lol. So, I guess I'll comment on the map as I see it rather than as a map I just made!

This bad boy is fairly typical as far as my island maps go, we got a series of ramps and ledges leading up to the focal point, the ruins of a very small lighthouse. As far as complexity is concerned, it looks like I decided to keep it pretty straightforward with a single landmass, which I think makes sense for a lighthouse island, though I'm now imagining a version of this map where the land continues offscreen to the bottom right, making this a peninsula, and I kinda feel like that might have been a bit of a missed opportunity. Hindsight, amIright?

 2. And if I didn't have much to say about the layout, I certainly don't have much to say about the outlines, haha. I do think I've started drawing rock walls a little more roughly since this map, and certainly I've been shying away from making maps with large rock walls as you see here. In the last year I decided that these look a little awkward and ugly, instead aiming for more 'implied' height that comes across more in shading and layered, smaller ledges. I'm still working this out, so I'm not claiming that my new maps are much better, but this map is a little more egregious than my newer ones.

 3. Hey, these colors are pretty cool! I did a really good job making the water visually interesting and yucky, kinda like a bruise- neat! This is a good example of what I wanted to achieve with my Haunted maps last year and it's almost enough to make me want to make more. I won't, because several of you asked me not to, but this is pumping me up for releasing the rest of the ones I made and put aside.

Anyway, the colors contrast perfectly against my typical palette (as seen in the Tropical variant) as they express an extremely different vibe. So, I suppose I'm saying that, looking back, my Haunted palette was a success and I'm still happy with it!