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Design of a Townscape

Is a city-building game supposed to favor the creation of realistic looking townscapes during its gameplay?

Is a city-building game supposed to favor the creation of realistic looking townscapes during its gameplay? Or should a realistic look be sacrificed at least partially to come up with a less lifelike looking but more accessible settlement (i.e. keeping every building nicely separated from each other)? How does a typical village—in our case, fantasy / historic / steam-punk-oriented settlements—have to look like anyway? For Coobico, we want to achieve an organic look, where buildings form larger blocks, with individual premises sometimes forming small alleys and sometimes abutting; but without providing griefers with an opportunity to create settlements as “walls of buildings” to block parts of a map. 

We currently went back to the drawing board to solve these issues and came up with the following solution: we are going to turn structures into blocks of buildings. Each block features a primary building (those we have presented so far, like farms and workshops) plus several small additional “slots”, which originally contain placeholder-huts. These slots can then be upgraded with more meaningful structures like warehouses, defenses and so on (check out the following image of a merchant with three slots). We are even pondering about throwing in an optional “automatic mode”, where slots are grown into the most fitful upgrades automatically—that would be our ultimate, fresh approach to combine the opposing styles of plopping and zoning cityscapes.

BTW: we will also include individual names for building quarters. This is a simple design-decision which will greatly benefit the players in our opinion: you can use it to further customize your settlement with descriptive labels like tavern-names and the like, or even to implement your own system of street-names.

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