Welcome back! This week's map is the Tropical Swamp (30x30), which is called that because, as far as I can tell, that's the correct term for a jungle-y swamp, and if I ever incorrectly name a landform then you know I end up hearing about it. Anyway, I felt like making my jungles more swampy but even so it wasn't swampy enough for me so your variant is Swampier, good for you!
The classic swamp map setup- a bit of land here and there but largely we've got lots of murky water. The design process here came down to how much of a throughline do I want it to possess- a full path through the center with bridges? A small path leading to some sort of objective? This time I chose to just keep it natural with implied paths through, no bridges but gaps small enough to jump.. tough luck if you're traveling with wagons- next time don't journey through a swamp.
Thankfully I've built up enough of a library of jungle props over the last couple months that I can whip up a map like this relatively quickly, I didn't need to consider drawing new palm trees (this time), big leafy plants, or roots.. though I did alter many of the props to some degree to fit the environment slightly better. The roots I changed to look more like they were entering the water, the plants a little more ragged, small things like that. I chose this map to make this week because I felt that it would be perfect for getting my schedule back on track after it got terribly skewed following a series of busy weeks where I fell horribly behind schedule. It won't get better either, I'll be out of town next weekend so I'll finish this month with another mad dash to get maps done.
Many of my recent maps have crawled over the finish line, having gone through a series of progressively worse and worse iterations that have resulted in overcomplicated layers of color effects and lighting. The colors for this map started with the colors and effects of the last map that felt somewhat grounded to me, the Jungle River, which might have had the most impressive palette but at least the file structure wasn't spiraling out of control quite yet in the pursuit of a decent jungle palette. Anyway, this started there and was tweaked into a swamp, which honestly sits nicely with me as some sort of jungle palette as well, somehow, so that's nice.