Contest: Second MotQ [Voting Thread]

Brane's map is very good, but I never liked "caves" that are huge, and seemingly have no set ceiling. It looks far more mountainous than like a cave to me because of the fact that it doesn't have an obvious height limit. I like the use of rocks, and playability is clearly much higher than in my map. I do not like the use of the gray rock above the white rock. I always felt that this tileset was either showing the same type of rock from various distances, or that it was showing different sedementry layers. This map seems to be much more in line with the second of he two, but that gray formation still sticks out like a sore thumb to me. All in all a great map. It was probably only the fact that I never cared much about playability, and that I never liked caves that felt like they were too mountainous that kept me from voting for this one instead.

Darth's map has the same problem as Brane's in my opinion. Where would you fit a cave that big!? In addition to that the rocks seem a little worse placed to me they don't seem to be where they should given how caves form. The placement of the waterfall is a nice touch, and I like how much this map appears to be centered around gameplay. The problem is that it seems to gain gameplay and story elements by sacrificing aesthetic beauty. Whenever I go through an area in an rpg, I vary rarely care about how much room I can move around in. I instead always think about how a specific area feels and what it represents in real life. I never liked the cerulean cave tileset because I could never think of anywhere that there was green rock and purple dirt. On top of this, I feel it nessecary to add that, while I don't count it off a map, there were quite a few tile errors.

Finally I get to my map. The main flaw with my map is playability. While both Darth's map and Brane's map had good playability, I made a conscious effort to forgoe playability in the attempt to create an environment which felt like the caves I've seen. Most of them were not very large. They had fairly low ceilings, were small and had tons of rocks. You can walk/surf over all the small pebbles and mushrooms by the way. This cave is meant to be fairly unexplored and expansive, while still keeping a slightly cramped and dank feeling. As I've said before, I never cared a huge amount about whether the map was super playable or not so long as it gave off the right kind of vibe and thrill to the player. Also I feel that my cave is cave sized. The other caves are larger and taller than anything you're likely to come across in a cave in reality. Especially with structural integrity accounted for.