Gorgon Lair Mockup aka Environment Design is Hard

I've been working on developing an "authoritative" mockup for the Gorgon lairs, which means:

• a.) Making a lot of practical decisions about each part of the environment (how do we treat the edge of the map? How wide is that edge? Do we have walls? Doors? How many layers of background will there be? What happens below the floor?). These give Nate something to shoot for when he actually starts making all these things happen.

• b.) Figuring out a lot about the enemies themselves—e.g. what are these Gorgons up to anyway? What sorts of things are in their lairs? What materials do they use? How detailed/carved out is the space? What design motifs are here?

• c.) Getting the environment to feel unified. Picking a color scheme, having consistent shapes, making the important parts pop out and the unimportant parts recede, keeping it interesting but not too busy, all that art director stuff.

Turns out! Art director stuff is scary, and is not my default state. My default state is wandering willy nilly across styles day by day. I was offered a promotion to an art direction role at a job once; I turned it down. So this whole environment-design thing has been a learning experience for me (by "learning experience," I mean, "over a dozen iterations of this particular picture and more crying than you might think").

We're getting closer though. Next step is to create art that Nate can put into a map, and we'll see how it feels & update/add from there. Interspersed with that, I'll probably start in on some other environments (forest, ruins, other types of lairs) and see if I can then get those to feel different, but like they live in the same game as this one.