Gelikall - The Unfinished
This is a WIP city. Its been puttering along at about a few dozen blocks per week for...well, quite a few weeks.Oddly, it is one of a rare few of my cities without a world. The block sizes and street widths mean that this is probably not a modern city (from a tech standpoint), and its overall size is only achieved since it is an amalgam (agglomerate?) of six originally separate settlements. This little diagram shows what I was thinking at the beginning (Each circle could be a town/city by itself and the double circles are the six original settlements).
Senkhall-1.gif
Below is what I have for Riverrun, Fentil, Portsend, Temple, with bits of Junction and a sampling of Dunfort across the river. The blank area in the middle is University. It is not much to look at yet but I am working my way down through Junction and will probably complete that half of the city before turning north. The University and Temple areas also will each have a 'campus' map. Hopefully making myself accountable to you guys will help keep me on task. I know I've bitten off more than I can chew, but that is balanced by me not knowing when to give up. I am hoping to get at least through the bottom half by the end of November, but we will see.
I have no clue how this could be/should be/would be presented yet (although it is unlikely I will get more detailed than a block plan) but I am open to ideas.
Also, any suggestions/encouragements/ridicules are always welcome.
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It i very hard to comment on the city at this stage, because there isn't any info yet, but it has a mosaic look to it. It's kinda pretty and a bit mesmerising, actually. Maybe that could give you ideas for final presentation.
Keen to see how it progresses.
PS: I think the word you're after is 'conurbation'.
THW
I agree that mosaic effect really is nice, it'll be interesting to see if it comes out with the same impression in final. It's probably due to the negative space though so it'll be tough to keep. The evoloution of area diagram is a neat idea, it would work well with with Ravi Shankar's tutorial on cities and his suggestion of a scatter diagram.
Well, I have to admit that the mosaic effect is an unintentional (if welcome) side effect of trying to make my progress (or lack-thereof) legible. I will certainly keep it in mind when (if ever) I get to the Presentation stage. I've included another image below with the linework, so you can see how things look when I am putting the city together (pretty much a line soup). I also zoomed out a bit to show how the original diagram translates to the actual layout.
Thanks for pointing me to Ravi's tutorial, Falconius. I think I do something similar to his Splatter Diagram idea mentally, but it would probably be good to get that information down on paper. Also, he brings up a good point later when mentioning that the level of detail to be shown at the end should be considered at the beginning. That is something I did not do with this map, so hopefully I can still make it work.
PS - Thanks for the word, THW! I figured there was probably a better option out there.
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Slow and steady
Just a quick update to show that there is still not much to show. I am continuing to work my way south.
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Another quick update, still nothing too exciting to look at. I missed my end-of-November deadline for the Southern half of the city, but things are still moving faster than before.
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When (If!) I finish with the blocks I thought it might be interesting to show political influence of the ruling families, maybe something similar to a vote map for an election. See a quick and dirty proof-of-concept below (and please forgive the confetti-like colors!).
Senkhall-2a3b.jpg
Progress
I was able to make a little progress over the holidays and I feel like there is finally enough city to really get a feel for what is going on. Steadmount is the only real city section left of the Southern half. Now the question is: What do I do with all these block!?
Senkhall-6.gif
You could try to add some tectures, like rooftop maybe ? and maybe more randomness
Yes, for now the position of the buildings is way too regulat to look natural. More smalll gaps and randomness, more diversity with alleys, backyards, places, some empty spaces would help to make it looks like a living city imho.
Azelor and Max are right about the regularity of the housing blocks, but I don't think randomness is the answer. In a real city, property boundaries often start big and get subdivided as owners realise they can rent out parts of their block. My suggestion therefore is to start grouping together some of those blocks you have. Another way of thinking about it would be to simply paint black over many--but not all--of the alleys, so that you start to have larger and irregularly shaped blocks (it would also give you the diversity of alleys that Max suggests). The addition of backyards and empty spaces is also a good idea.
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