Another 2 Lux Maps: Illusion & Pac-Lux

I've done two more maps for Lux, the first of which is called "Illusion."

How I came up with Illusion is an interesting story.

When making "The Lantern," I had become intrigued by the idea of concentric rings moving in opposite directions, and decided to expand on that theme, simplifying it as well, making that the sole gimmick. I made the concentric rings accessible through any given space this time, meaning that you could move up and down the "shafts" of aligned spaces freely. This perhaps made it a little too easy to move around the board, since my whole point had been to provide an interesting gimmick for movement, but oh well, it was still a pretty cool idea.
Instead of having arrows in the overground image, I just made the countries arrow-shaped this time, to make it easier to remember which ring went in which direction.

As for the theme, that was real fun. I opened up Adobe Illustrator and filled a large square with the gray pyramids pattern available in the swatch panel. I then converted that file to Photoshop format, opened it up, and adjusted the size of the canvas a little so the square edges of the photoshop image would align perfectly with the edges of a large square filled with square pyramids (align the edges).
I then duplicated that layer to make two squares full of pyramids. On the top one, I used the "Polar Coordinates" filter and selected the "rectangular to polar" option to make an even circle of pyramids, and cut that circle out with the circle marquee tool. I then applied a 50-pixel twirl to that layer to make a slight spiral.

Now for the fun part. I selected the gradient tool and armed it with the rainbow gradient, set the transparency to "color" and the layout to radial and gave that mess a nice rainbow hue. Then I set the transparency mode to "difference," selected another gradient, and went to town, laying out gradients again and again, one on top of the other, to make a beautiful rainbow pattern on the top layer. I used nearly every colorful gradient I had in the pallete, several gradient alignments, a few different transparency modes (mostly difference and overlay), and from a different, random location each time. I then fiddled with the brightness and contrast a little to bring out even more of the colors, and the circle was perfect, practically glittering with bright colors.
I then selected the bottom layer, the one that still had the square pyramids. I repeated the process, laying down gradient after gradient set to various transparency modes and from a different location each time, and then toying with the brightness and contrast to really bring out the colors. And there you have it, it looked unbelievable.

Now to make the map.

In the overground, I saved a copy, and in that copy I brought out the little arrangement of countries I'd laid out, selected them with the magic wand, and then deleted their shapes from the overground PNG to make holes for the countries. After that it was a simple matter of opening up the editor and drawing around the edges of those shapes, connecting the countries, and then going into the file using text edit and making the one-way connections, the same way I did on The Lantern, and I was good to go. I put the title and my name in the overground, but flipped the image to make it backwards (as part of the whole "illusion" motif).

My next map was a little different.

I had a feeling that to get the attention of the community I had to do something a little brazen. The obvious choice, of course, would be to take another established game and make a Lux map out of it (such as RickLionhart's "MonopoLuxy" and "Lux Invaders").
The first thing that came to mind was Pac-Man. It was simple, just make the dots larger and turn them into countries and make the corridors into paths. Oh, and make the big dots worth a bonus each and the ghosts worth a negative bonus. I also added a few dots in the middle corridors (where there aren't any dots in the original game for some reason) to make more paths, and I made the home of the Ghosts a country in itself.
Deciding where to put the Ghosts was a little tricky, but I figured since they were worth a negative bonus, it made sense to place them at intersections to make it harder to avoid them, to increase the strategy a little.
I at first drew the dots in the map editor with the "Create stock shapes" tool to make hexagons, but after a lot of trial-and-error I realized they'd be too small to click on that way, so I drew a bunch of squares by hand. Thankfully there were no one-way connections to deal with this time, so the connections were more straightforward.

For the theme, I downloaded a large Pac-Man wallpaper and copied and pasted some stuff for the overground image. I made it clear in the new theme how much each bonus was worth (this took some creative cutting and pasting of letters to make new words), and also copied some icons to make a lineup of bonus listings.

And here you have it, "Pac-Lux."