Cityographer Preview of Buildings for Futuristic Settings
[I just posted this to the project’s Kickstarter updates page and am posting it here in case you backed it but don’t subscribe to those updates or if you missed it and are interested. It will be available to people who weren’t part of the Kickstarter when it hits beta, hopefully in 1-2 months.]
The futuristic buildings were a bit of a challenge for Keith Curtis & I in two ways: First, how do we differentiate the futuristic building based on their purpose? Second, how do we accommodate different styles of futuristic buildings and what are those styles?
To address the first question, in the medieval and modern icon sets we were able to use some outside features to differentiate the buildings. But that gets harder with futuristic buildings… we don’t know what if any outside features there may be in the future for many business/building types. The answer was to add icons to the rooftops. It helps you (the map reader) know what is there, but it also would be rooftop advertising for the business. And we could reuse a smaller set of buildings with different icons to cover all the building types we need.
That allowed us to address the issue of different futuristic styles. We identified 3 futuristic styles: a clean style (think Star Trek Federation) a gritty/cyber style (Blade Runner-esque) and a retro style (“City of the Future” from 1950s/60s Popular Science magazines or maybe pulp science fiction.) So instead of having a few futuristic cafes and a few gas stations and a few banks, we have a few small business buildings in each of the 3 styles.
The image below shows 2 skyscrapers in each of the three styles. (Note these do not have the icons for business type added yet.)
