Welcome to the Grand Hotel, a majestic hotel on the sunny south coast where you can enjoy good food while lazing on the beach! Sounds like the perfect vacation, doesn't it? Except for the fact that the rooms are tiny and expensive, you're nickel and dimed for everything, and there are barely any amenities. So after a disastrous stay here, Elinor decides she needs to open an inn nearby and make it better than the Grand Hotel!

This is the opening scene of The Hidden Art of Innkeeping, and one of the first maps I created for the game. I thought it might be interesting to show how this map evolved - I started with the idea of a big, imposing, and yet impersonal hotel by the beach with lots of rooms and an outdoor cafe area. Then, to give the impression that it's in a large city, I paved the area and added some shops and greenery.

Much later on, I added some people and movement to keep it vibrant, but now that I think about it, I'm going to add more people to this scene so that it looks uncomfortably crowded as well!