It's all Ursula's fault.
So I've been dealing with the Cancer Bullshit and trying to do #nanomiddlemo, as it were--I.E., use the general November energy to get a chunk out of The Folded Sky inasmuch as possible under current conditions--and I've been using playing around in Townscaper as my reward. It's a casual building game with no timers, no resource management, no ads, and no micropayments that costs five bucks in the app store and works just fine on my phone. (It does eat battery.) The only goal is to build a neat city on islands in the water, and you get to build the islands yourself.
It's a lovely little low-stress game, and perfect for fiddling with while listening to a podcast or audiobook or whatever because it doesn't use the verbal brain at all. I spend so much time in Narrative Space for work that sometimes other narratives feel a bit like a busman's holiday, but I'm a terrible visual artist so I often relax by fooling around in photoshop or playing terrible guitar--and guitar is out right now because of my surgical recovery, sigh.
So far, I've been working on two towns, with very different aesthetics and design philosophies, and it's left me thinking about worldbuilding.
The first one I did, I went in sort of without a plan other than "Rainbows!" and I am incredibly pleased with the aesthetic of the fantasy favela that sprang up totally spontaneously by following only that "rule," and one where there should always be a footpath to any building. I think it's a testament to the designers of the game how intuitive I found it--and how hard it is to make something that looks terrible.
I love how you make a building and there's a little chiming sound as people move in, put out plants and benches, and make themselves at home.
My towns don't have names, because the game is so freeform that you don't even have to name things.
This town is obviously one that grew up spontaneously over time. No planning board here, no zoning laws, nobody cares if you yell that they're blocking your light.
I love how little spaces emerge, and neighborhoods, and people who are obviously friends or don't get along--and you can detect it just from the patterns of the buildings.
This one guy keeps feeding the damn seagulls. And the person in the green house down there is desperately trying to keep their patio plants alive in the shadow of the overpass and is pretty pissed off about it.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in the archipelago, we have historic, scenic NIMBY-town with its many bridges and wide footpaths. These people run on a tourist economy, like many well-preserved historic villages here in New England.
They have definitely got a conformist attitude, a town planner, a zoning board, and possible a really aggressive historical commission.
They dredge their harbor. Possibly there's still a little fishing going on as well. The boats are all out right now. (The game could use some boats, I think, but honestly its lack of moving parts is one of the reasons it's so relaxing. There's just the lap of the waves and that flock of birds.)
You can just tell that half of those places are museums now. It's somewhere between Newport, RI, and Mystic Seaport. But some real people still live here!
This guy with the mauve house is a nine-day's wonder to all their neighbors.
I love what the person on the bridge has done with that old lighthouse, though.
I went into this one with an intentionally limited mostly-neutral palette with only two accent colors, and the ideal of a lot of open space and broad accessible roads. And not too much layering.
There's no good way to build ramps, but the tiny invisible folks will put in stairs between levels if you build the connections right, or ladders if you don't. I hope they all have good harnesses and clip-ins, because a fall would be devastating. But you could rappel to work!
The commute home up the ladder at the end of the long day is brutal, though.
Reminds me a little bit of Luxembourg City, actually.
These folks know they run a tourist town. There's a lot of hotels and viewfinders scattered down, and steps and ladders for beach access. Some folks obviously dock their boats right at the foot of their foundations and just scoot up some iron rungs to their doors.
Everybody got a viewfinder.
Even here, though, people are gonna string clotheslines between bits of your monumental architecture, even if it's the city gates:
And I love this person hanging on their beachfront house, paying the exorbitant taxes and keeping their view while the condos go in behind...
Anyway, I'm having a heck of a time. And if you've ever wanted your own private Stockholm (or Venice for that matter) now you can.
I hope there will eventually be downloadable content for different building styles and color palettes and grid alignments, and I'd love to be able to build parks as well as plazas (if that's possible I haven't figured out how) but right now, it's all the joyous parts of Sim City (for me at least) without all the annoying traffic problems and Kaiju.
And I guess there's a little insight for you in how I handle worldbuilding.
Back to #nanomiddlemo for me. I hope you have as good a day as that person with the viewfinder and the beach stairs is having.
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Best,
Bear