WIP: Terass

[RedKettle]

I wanted to try drawing a town/city with roofs, since I have not done that in a while, and I had a couple different town ideas that I wanted to explore.

The first idea I had was from St. Paul island. I thought the shape of the island was pretty cool, but wanted to see it as a peninsula instead of an island, so I traced over the outline and connected it to land before I started trying to figure out how the town would work.

I really just wanted a small set of roofs at first to test out some different styles.
peninsula1-6-Layout1 (3).jpg

When I started drawing though, I kept thinking that the townspeople would expand their town just a little more in one direction, and then a little more in another. Very quickly the whole southeast quadrant of the peninsula was developed. And then I thought these townsfolk would definitely want to maximize their land use and drain that brackish swamp in the northeast as well. They couldn't use it for farmland but they could probably expand even more...With over half the island now designated as city I decided to reign myself in and only commit to the lower right quadrant for now (the brown blobbed area), but it will still be too much city to show individual roofs, so I had to hunt around for another idea for roof studies.
peninsula2-6-test1 (3).png

Another idea I was looking at was a small community established near the top of a terraced hill, in a fairly hilly area. I was thinking something similar to the Andenes of South America, so I decided to be inspired by a photo of a place near Pisac, Peru.

I thought shadow and shading would probably be what makes or breaks this map, so when looking for a style I kept thinking about the black-and-white-on-a-gray-background maps that a few people have pursued recently (I think Sarinthus is doing one now, but there was at least one I remember seeing a few months (years?) ago).
For some reason those really make the sale for me (they kind of remind me of working with charcoal), and I wanted to see how the idea applies to roofs. My quick and dirty proof-of-concept is below. If you ignore the shadows going in wrong directions, missing shading/shadows, the lack of detail, and if you squint really hard through one eye while looking in another direction, you will probably see that there is some potential in there! Somewhere.

Taress-1-1-1-8.5x11-sketch5.jpg
It turned out quite a bit creepier than I thought, like an abandoned clay-mation model town or something. I still think the style is worth pursuing, just to see how it looks completed.


I will probably take a step back and really think through the layout of Taress first, since for the study I just drew whatever I thought I saw in the photo. The rest of the effort will be texturing and shading, hopefully it does not turn out too scary!

[J.Edward]

I think it has potential. Love that phrase - like an abandoned clay-mation model town or something. Nice.
The appeal of the gray is probably due to much concept design being done on grey backgrounds.
It's considered neutral and shows contrast well.
I think it's going to be pretty cool when all said and done.

[viridianmasquerade]

It's a shame there's no updates on this, I would love to see a finished map in this lovely creepy style. It could be great for a horror-based game.

[RedKettle]

Thanks for the encouragement J.Edward and viridianmasquerade!

I am also eager to see this creepy style develop a little further, but I distracted myself a little while laying out the settlement. I wanted to hold off posting until I got back into the creepy style, but that might not be for another little while, so here is the current progress...

NOT-SQUARE NOT-CIRCLES.
One of the unintentional tensions created in the proof-of-concept was between the hard-edged roof/wall shapes and soft-edged shadows/highlights. I wanted to explore this a bit by breaking up the orthogonality of the shapes, so I started thinking... -CIRCLES-. Circles felt a bit too obvious though, so I tried a little harder to find some not-circle, not-square inspiration, and finally decided on Neolithic settlements (think Khirokitia, in Cyprus). Although the building clusters grow from circles, the end result is a little tougher to decipher.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khirokitia

Also, at least at Khirokitia, a little creep factor is already built in!

"...The dead were buried in crouched positions just under the floors of the houses. In some instances provision was made for offerings, possibly indicating a form of Ancestor cult within the households..."

I traced some of a neolithic plan, to start getting in the mindset.
Taress-1-1-4-8.5x11 (2).png

Through liberal copy-and-paste I quickly started building up Taress, but I have been both more and less successful at working within the circle-within-a-circle evolving style.
Taress-1-2-0-8.5x11-dia.png

Since the end result will only show the roofs, I probably don't need much more detail than what I have, but it has been interesting trying to get these plans to work. I would guess I am about 40% towards where I want to be before I move back to the shadow/highlight phase. I want to emphasize the serpentine circulation throughout a little more, and add some more individuality to the building clusters (and finish drawing the retaining walls, and re-check how the different terraces interact...).
Taress-1-2-0-8.5x11 (5).png

[Meshon]

Very cool style. I once visited the Neolithic forts on Inis Mór and they had a similar sort of organic feel to the layout, particularly the one called The Black Fort. It's really evocative.

And that is some creepy. Bury your ancestors under the floor? Yeah I'm sure I'd sleep well… "What's that scratching?"

[Larb]

This is really interesting. I'd not heard of Khirokitia before but your map definitely gives me the feeling of a neolithic village and reminds me of Chysauster in Cornwall. But on a larger scale.

[snodsy]

This has an interesting concept, I'll be following this thread to see how it comes out. I love the neolithic idea.

[Barek333]

A very interesting concept, great to see it evolve.