It's "spooky season," so I had to map something in honor of the season. I have a few other ideas, including a swamp witch's home (we'll see if I can pull off designing a swamp). But first, a haunted mansion on a hill overlooking a church and its appurtenant graveyard.

This is done mostly in Creepy Crypts, with buildings from Darklands City and CD3, and a few things brought in from Forest Trail (mostly the trees and the tower ruins for wells). The stained glass window reflections are from the Mike Schley monthlies. (Why, you may ask, are the reflections outside? The last thing I will do will be to play with the lighting to show that this is at night -- the lights are inside the church, shining out, rather than the other way around.)

Working on the environs first and then with tackle inside. Still have to finish populating the graveyard and

Here's a collage of all four seasons all together. (In retrospect, I should have widened the other borders to match Winter's.)

Been out of commission with the flu the last few days, but on the mend now. I wanted to submit the Spring, Autumn, and Winter versions of my village of Arbor Hollow in case Remy finds it easier to process them at the same time as the Summer version, which was submitted as part of the Atlas contest.

Here are images, followed by the FCW files. The description is the same for each, but I will provide again here anyway.

That’s a good point that I hadn’t thought about. When I’m designing a new map, I often draw polygon blobs on a temporary sheet to get a sense of what I want to do, and what goes where. This would be a fun way to sketch out a rough layout.

I went back to my previous save -- the last version before starting on the trees -- so that I could replace the trees individually to ensure exact placement. Having the coniferous and deciduous trees on separate sheets made it easier so that I could focus on the firs and the barren trees separately. (Another tips: make sure all of your original trees are on the Vegetation layer and then freeze the other layers -- before I did that, it was way too easy to accidentally grab other things unintentionally.)

Also (not sure if I mentioned this before), I used the effects from one of the Winter Trail sample maps on the white text. I think it makes them stand out nicely. One of the other samples used red text, which made for a nice contrast but felt a little jarring for this map. But I could do a dark blue like the legend if folks think that's better.