Slightly More Authoritative Concepts for Village & Forest

In the rare pockets of time that I drag my carcass in front of the Wacom these days, I've been working to get mockups together for other environments, in the vein of the Gorgon lair mockup from a while ago.

These help us figure out things like, "What happens at the edge of the map?" "How do we keep the background from getting too busy?" "What has outlines vs. what doesn't?"

These aren't quite production-level yet:

• I didn't extend the map-edge treatment.
• There will be a secondary floor texture in the forest, the way there is in the village, so that the ground can fade between them and look better.
• Maybe we'll need to do something different with those fading-out house walls.
• The background set pieces are mostly flat, blocked-in vectors, since I wanted to make sure they worked at all before taking the time to texture and detail them. I learned that I will need WAY less detail than I thought I was going to, and I count that as a bonus.
• I'm sure there are other things I'm forgetting.

But they'll help Nate have a visual target to shoot for when creating atmospheric effects and whatever algorithms create out the backgrounds, and they help me build out an actual asset list for environments, as opposed to "I dunno, I guess it'll need trees or something." Asset lists are my life raft in a sea of vague indiscipline.

Next up, I'll probably try to make a version of the village that's under attack & partially ruined/on fire, or a Drauven forest treehouse, or a differently-colored version of the forest (magical twilighty?) featuring some more prominent ruins. These will all require a lot more drawing... sigh.