This week's map is the Rocky Oasis (50x50), another big ol' desert map which, much like real deserts, is mostly full of sand. I remember bumping up against this reality a lot back when I started making desert maps for the first time a few years ago- realistic desert maps are 95% sand with a few rocks sprinkled in for flavor, but you can't make that map more than once before you have to include half-buried wizard statues, ancient ruins with nonsensical layouts, or unrealistically enormous bones. Anyway, here's my desert map with a few rocks and a pond in the middle.
Initially I was playing around with having the oasis be a little more recessed and surrounded by fewer/smaller rocks. Ultimately I found that the ledges didn't read well when they peaked through the sand, so those got cut (functionally they didn't provide much cover anyway, so no big loss), and the rocks got massively readjusted to feel more natural. The configuration in the sketch here has a very regular layout that looked wrong to me not long after I settled on it, if you tilt it 45 degrees there's a pretty clear diamond shape to the rocks' layout that's no good for me. I primarily fixed this issue by adding a huge rocky platform right above the oasis and cutting the ones in the top left, shifting the layout more toward the center. The big platform also made it feel more like the oasis you find on the way to Gerudo Town in Breath of the Wild which has a huge outcropping looming above it, and that always struck me as cool aesthetically.
This map shouldn't have taken me as long as it did, and I'd like to blame seasonal depression (which always hits me hard in January and February), but this week the release of Mewgenics has been the primary issue. I don't think there's a game I've played more than Binding of Isaac (amazingly, more than Guild Wars 2 or FFXIV I suspect) so finally getting another game from Edmund after all these years was a pretty huge distraction for me. I digress.
I continue to iterate on the rocky platforms. These ones are more similar to the jagged cliffs of last week's map rather than the more rounded boulders I've been sprinkling in. The main difference is how much of the platforms' walls are visible, very little, just a few lines to imply height. This feels very wrong to me, my impulse is to fully flesh out the details and depict the full height of these platforms with several layers of rocky details, but I've been trying to exercise some moderation recently and let lighting do some heavy lifting rather than outlines.
Long time members of the Neutral Party Patreon will remember me bitching about drawing palm trees in the past. Short time members of the Neutral Patreon will remember how my desert maps haven't had palm trees recently. This is because palm trees are still my least favorite things to draw and that won't change. My curse is that I hate every palm tree I've drawn previously and that means I have to try to draw a new and good one every time it comes up. It's a Sisyphean and the only recourse to to make maps that don't require palms. Unfortunately, I tend to draw maps that require palms on occasion.
Ok, colors. How colorful should an oasis be? Probably not this colorful, but it looks kinda nice, right? Anyway, it has to pop so there you have it- we got green plants and blue water, I even dropped in a water ripple texture to make it feel even more crisp. Otherwise, this bad boy's got colors and lighting taken almost directly from the Desert Gorge from a few week's back but a little more washed out in order to feel a bit more arid, simple and clean.