Desert Cave, Adept (Patreon)

Hello again, Adepts- this is the Desert Cave (34x34)! I hope you all had a lovely holiday season, did you get that dice set you wanted? I didn't, but I wasn't expecting anyone to buy me $100 Dungeon Meshi dice, so no surprises there. Maybe it'll be in stock again someday and I'll treat myself? Anything's possible!

Your alternate version of this map is Tainted, meaning I gave it a color swap that you'd expect to get your geiger counter ticking. I'd recommend making any trips in this cave quick, and maybe hold your breathe while in there, just to be safe.

As you can tell, I made a few changes to the structure of this map as time went on. When making caves I like to first nail down the walls and later consider how I might change up the elevation, adding tiered floors, bottomless pits, or open ceilings. This time I kept making changes for days after I thought I knew what I was doing. Firstly, this layout here was just too straightforward for me, the progression through the map is too simple and obvious so I considered instead adding a series of tiny little tunnels connecting each chamber to every other chamber, just for variety. It's not my usual impulse for maps but sometimes you gotta switch things up just to see how it feels.

I'll talk about how I think it worked out further down.

As I so often do, I tried out a ton of new things for this map. First, I'm always trying to find better ways of depicting cave floors so that they match what's in my head. I haven't nailed it yet, but I do like how I didn't have to agonize much about this one, it's just a few details around the edges to get across the feel of rockiness, that felt nice to me. However, the multiple textures of rock here did not quite work. The walls, and ledges have a sorta smoothed rock texture while the floor and boulders scattered around have more of a craggy rock texture. I think I could have easily avoided this by being more careful when texturing the walls and ledges, but by that point I was more focused on finishing the map quickly so it didn't cross my mind that there might be a contrast there. You might consider this a small thing to nitpick, and it might be, but it's a disparity that stands out to me.

Dusty ol' desert colors. My desert palette is ever evolving as I work out the kinks. This iteration focuses more on consistency rather than depicting the sunniness or heat of the desert. This palette is more grounded, with less glowy lighting and vibrant colors, and lighter shadows. I also have located better reference and have been using it to try to depict deserts in a more realistic way, not that there's a lot of proper desert here to compare and contrast.

So, the ledges. Obviously I was ambitious with all the levels of elevation inside the cave, I wanted shading to do the heavy lifting, but I think I overestimated how much it could accomplish with the layout provided. I definitely overdid it a little with the layout in places, I can honestly say, like the chamber in the bottom left. This chamber is just a bit too overcooked to read at a glance. It's unique, but another pass at its structure would do a lot for clarity.