big city digital tour!

hello friends. today i will write a digital tour of the planned first area of the game, the big city.

i am going to start with the low res concept version, and then afterwards show all of the spriting that I have completed.

this is going to be the player's apartment. the very first building you are in! in this building I want to have perhaps a few apartments open to the player, but they will all be dilapidated and abandoned.

goodness, i don't think i've explained it properly, but I want this game to be practically post-apocalyptic.

this city i imagine will be the most worn down place in the whole game, and as the game progresses the areas become more full of nature and life. i just feel like it hammers down the setting well! there will be no other characters besides the player (liable to change) and their cat, ski butters. everything will be torn down and grimy. but the player's apartment itself will be clean and well kept, because they keep it that way. the player will start in their apartment of course, so i think a big moment will be when the person playing realizes that the whole world is gross and destroyed, contrary to what they've seen so far

this is what i've made for the apartment so far. it looks very clean, but i have made a tool that will help make it look gross and grimy. i will give it a pass to show.

my settings weren't all correct, so this could possibly not be the exact finished product but you get the idea! since I have this tool, the sprites i've made so far are all clean; the grime will be added later!

next is the parking garage! fun fact, this was going to be the original starting place in the game! i imagined that the player was living in a makeshift shelter in the lower layer of this parking garage, but then i thought that if i was living in an abandoned city, i would want probably take what i could and live in an actual house and clean it up myself.

and this is the parking garage with no grime! an important i want to be in the game is per-pixel collsion. this would allow me to make amazingly intricate environments; the ladder on the right side will have collision! i'm not sure if i will implement walking up it however...

next is the fire station! i think a player will get an important key here. i will not tell which kind because it is a spoiler for something later in the tour!

this is the fire station so far. i have yet to add an entry door (on the right side i think) and I also want to add some trees or bushes (more vines pog) in the front. i think there also may be a firetruck blocking the garage section.

this firetruck will go unused. it is too isometric! i think it looks really great though, so that's why i posted it.

next is the barber shop! i wanted to add a barber shop in to have an excuse to make a striped canopy. that's it! also there was a barber shop in the very first build of ski butters. i will show you!

the barber shop is the one on the left! the middle would be a dollar store, and the right was a diner.

here's what the diner would have looked like. it was really difficult to smash everything into (practically) three colors. i want the darkest to be used for enemies and out of bounds areas like the inside of walls. the dollar store never had an interior

and this was the inside of the barber shop. you may notice a weird pillar on the left. that was actually going to be part of a giraffe

and he was getting a haircut!

this is the barber shop now. looking back at those old pictures, i really like what I did for the door frame so i think i will use that somewhere in my new city. unfortunately, i don't think I will add in the giraffe to the final game. i am so sorry.

over here is going to be a big hospital building. it has a helipad, and a big screen that could be showing an ad (cyberpunk vibe) the circle thing in the center would be a water fountain, and the tuning fork object above it would be a subway entrance. top left you can see the barber shop and the fire station. i don't have anything sprited here!

up this way you can see where i would put a train platform. there are trees out here, but I'm not sure if that's something i will keep because i think it would be damaging to the atmosphere of the section. more on that later. i think i just have it in here now because of how much I love that train sprite i posted in one of my earlier posts.

this is a long stretch of road that passes the hospital. the top left is a department store, which i will show later. it has a billboard too. i think this stretch will be very "city-like" with tons of ads. like those pictures of new york city billboards. the bottom buildings are dummy. they won't be accessible. the road in the middle to the left will be blocked off. i wanted to add this in to make the city seem bigger than what we are getting.

this is the white building that was on the left in the earlier picture. i think this will be a business building. i don't have much ideas for what will go inside here.

beside that is an alleyway with garbage ! and beside that another set of buildings. the one in the center will be a bank, and the one on the right side will be a radio tower. i don't have many ideas for the interiors of either either (neat word choice). the bank will show evidence of chaos, from all the people trying to get their money before the world ended. the radio tower will have some broken radio parts that could disclose the state of the world, supply the player with some exposition on the setting, or just add to the atmosphere. likely all three.

behind those buildings there is the department store, a parking lot, and a cafe. i like the idea of a cafe. in the department store, there will be a set of bolt cutters that the player will get to gain the ability to break through fences, in the image of the area currently in my mind. i'll explain my general idea more when i show the bigger picture soon.

i did some work on the department store! i want to add some big chunks missing from the walls and such.

the last part i've sprited is the OTHER subway enterance. i think this one looks great, but the stairs are quite ambiguous.

this is the star of the show in the big city. a park! the player will go north from the parking spaces, past the lake, across to the train tracks, and snake around the rest of the park, unlocking shortcuts back along the way. i want nature to be a dominating theme in this area, as a stark contrast to the gross city from before. the final exit will be the well in the bottom middle.

this is all i have so far.

as i imagine it, the player will start in the apartment, there will be a blockade to the right stopping access to the right northern road, opened by the bolt cutters. in the fire station will be a key that opens the gate to the park, but you similarly need bolt cutters to get in to it (the park gate cannot be bolt cutted? garbage game design. makes no sense.). i am still working on that. the player will go south of the fire station, around the business building, bank, and radio tower, and then get in to where the depsrtment store is. they will obtain the bolt cutters, and then be able to go back to the beginning by breaking the gate that was blocking them in the beginning. you will be able to get access to the fire station, which gets you the key, and you can get into the park, where it is a proverbial straight shot to the ending.

i love this idea a lot, but it doesn't incorporate the subway, which i really want to implement. the only difficulty is making something that makes sense. the first subway station could possibly be accessed with the bolt cutters, which means the blockade between the parking garage and cafe would need to be absolute so you would need to go through the subway. but then that would be abandoning the opportunity for that really powerful shortcut at the one intersection that i have sprited. its all speculation.

i think the train station will be a fast travel type thing, but i'm not sure about it, and not only because of the notion that i may change that area. one theme that i want to make prevalent in the game is that the player will travel very far through the game. there won't be many main hub areas that branch off. this means the game will be very linear, but i think it's possible to make a good linear game. to drive home this feeling of travelling far, fast travel could simply not be a part of the game

but that's all i'm writing now. i hope you enjoyed the digital tour of the big city!

thank you for coming!