Added a Home Improvement "big-box" style store (hence the 'H I' on the sign) - keeping it a single tile still makes it feel pretty small, I might need to expand it out to 2 tiles though. I also want to find more signals to indicate that buildings are shops besides having a big sign on the tile, but I don't have a lot of great ideas that will fit into the resolution. Something to think about. :)
Added the start to a set of row shops today I don't love the building shapes (they're boxes, after all), but I do like leaving some space in back for stuff like the dumpster, and the billboard signage on top. It'll be interesting to see how these feel as I have more shops to surround them with.
Started to set up a new 'commercial' block on the map, it's pretty threadbare right now but over the next few days I'm hoping to fill it out with other shops, restaurants, and alleyways.
I've hit an odd bug in qubicle (the voxel tool I'm using) where it's glitching and not letting me select areas to duplicate. :( It really slowed me down making this new block, hopefully an update will come soon that fixes it.
Added a fast food restaurant today, I think I'm going to need to break up the town with a 3rd block soon - maybe commercial/shopping so I can build more stuff like that?
Added a single family home with a fenced backyard in the residential block, and recolored the residential apartment buildings
Another long work day - on my break I tried to make a small apartment building. Ran into an issue where the bigger windows I'm using for housing looked (even more) flat when I had a long flat wall of them, so I tried mixing up window colors to see if it'd help (blue = lights off, yellow = lights on). I'm not sure I'll keep it that way but it was worth trying
Busy with work today so not a ton of time.
Added a new skyscraper with fountains in front & some little people on the sidewalks. I'm not sure how well the people 'read' in a static scene, but if I animate this I think it'll be a lot easier to sell them as they bounce along the sidewalk.
Also want to work on my palette a bit at some point, as I add more and more I find I'm struggling to keep colors varied but still having a feeling of consistency.
Didn't have a ton of time today, so I added cars and a little park walkway with a fountain. Really starting to feel the constraints of the scale on some of these smaller pieces - cars are 4 x 3 x 4 blocks! So I have to focus on trying to find a shape that sells the concept and then do what I can with color choice
Added some row houses today, as well as expanded out the footprint of the town so I have more room to place stuff going forward.
Things I don't love:
Going to keep working on this for a while I think, today I added the little market and some road to put all the buildings around.
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@jp Hmm, yeah - I've tried to do parking lots on a couple of the tiles with buildings and it's been really tough -- the space left over after adding the building usually isn't enough to indicate more than one space.
I might try using a whole tile as a parking lot and place those in between shops occasionally to see how it feels, I agree that it would help indicate the purpose of the area more.
Thanks!
Stores need parking lots (you kind of have them as empty tiles right now), maybe if they had white markers for the car spots or something (and street access) they would help indicate a shopping area. (not sure if it will work resolution wise)