This week's map is the Jungle Trail (40x35), another lovely little jungle map with lots of little details and complex terrain. Your variant, however, is a little less complex- I cut away nearly everything from the bottom ledge and filled it in with water, making this much more restrictive than before. I think this variant has a lot of potential, and because of it I might try to make more variants that cut away portions and replace them with water. I think it's neat!
My initial plans for this map included a ravine in the center rather than the ledges I ended up with, the idea being that I could slot some rapids, lava, or an abyss into the center as the variants. That sounded cool, but I was having trouble framing the ravine in a way that felt right and the areas topside continued to feel underdesigned without anything interesting to place in there. After some thought I decided that I would keep the map focused on the ledges themselves but alter the map to be more natural, a path winding along a cliffside. Nothing crazy, but there's room there for some fun details and plenty of space for a fun combat. I suppose that's my niche at the end of the day, straightforward environments with enough complexity for creative fights. That's what I think, at least.
The outlines for these jungle maps are a bit overwhelming, sheesh. The cliffs are really the complicated stuff, though I'm getting much faster about drawing them- the key for me is to just put down some lines and trust it'll work out as I go, that's tricky for me because my impulse is to tweak the shape of the terrain endlessly until I'm satisfied or too frustrated to worry about it anymore. Anyway, I'm trying to get back to my faster work schedule I used to keep when I started map-making, where I didn't know enough to worry about the small details and instead just did what felt right, hopefully now my intuition can keep the maps feeling good even when made slightly quicker and with less mulling.
I spent much of last week's map disliking the palette I was working with but found myself stuck on time and too behind schedule to fix it the way I wanted- from scratch. This week I tried to give myself time to work through the palette and get things right. I like the colors I had with my Jungle Cave map from a few weeks back, but I couldn't match the vibe with the next few I made despite using the same palette and lighting effects. For this I went back to the map that I used as the basis for the Jungle Cave's palette, the River Delta, and tweaked it from there. I got pretty close to what I wanted, but I feel there's still room for improvement. Maybe I'll get there next week!