Hello everyone! Though I said I'd be talking about dialogue this week, I've decided to postpone that in favour of keeping up the momentum of worldbuilding. I've made far more strides this week in planning my setting than I'd expected, and I'm ridiculously pleased with that. I had been dreading having to flesh the world out for so long, but I had no idea how easy it was going to be through using Cities: Skylines.
You may or may not have read last week's blog before I made an addendum, which was this rough layout of my fictional suburb, Glensyde:
By referencing this drawing, I created a new map (right-hand image) in Cities: Skylines which is pretty accurate to what I had in mind (I also changed the map to one with a slightly different river than my earlier map). Note that all the district names are auto-generated and are not final, and some of the streets aren't finished because I hadn't unlocked parts of the map when I was making them.
Creating an immersive setting via mods and assets:
Cities: Skylines sets you up with a fairly neutral architectural style. We're talking mid-century suburbia, modern high-rises, and your average billboard-heavy shopping districts. It works fine as a template, and I was initially happy to base my backgrounds off of what the game offered me. Then, I found the work of some very talented modders within the Steam Workshop, particularly users Macwelshman and rik4000 who create assets to overhaul the game's base style into one much more familiar to the UK. The town now feels far more authentic to its setting with this simple change.
How to add custom architectural styles in Cities: Skylines
Look up the sort of assets you want in the Steam Workshop, subscribe to the assets, and they should immediately download into the game. On the main menu (you can't do this in-game), go into options, and create a new style in the 'styles' menu. Then, go into the 'assets' menu, and add every individual asset to your new style. Go in-game, open the districts menu and click on a district. This opens a window, where the option to change the default style to your new style will be at the bottom of it. Do this to every district whose style you want changed, then (if the game is paused) unpause the game and wait for the new styles to be built.
Note that if you're not playing with cheats on (i.e. infinite money), you should do this one district at a time and not all at once, as the houses will all deconstruct themselves basically immediately. If you do it all at once, like I did, you will end up with a very low population and lots of people upset that the power's not working, which would've been a disaster if I was playing without cheats enabled. In terms of being a mayor, I am like, the George W. Bush of mayors. I accidentally demolished so many people's houses just trying to build a fence between them.
My current mod list for Cities: Skylines
The First Person Camera mod allows me to walk around the city. This is huge for what my overall intentions are with using this game. I am able to get shots at any angle I want with no issues. I can walk around and figure out which routes my characters will take to school.
Considering that this game is not designed to be played in first-person, the level of detail is pretty mind-blowing.
Through Cities: Skylines I'm able to mimic the problems with the town and simulate what impact these problems will have on the community. The high crime rate created a ton of abandoned houses, which is exactly what I'm going for. Glensyde is arbitrarily divided into a working-class South and a lower-middle-class North, which makes for a fairly mild but nonetheless impactful class divide. The North has far better infrastructure and a lot more to do, whereas the South is a sparser residential area which is heavily industrialized due to the presence of natural gas and oil. It's also where the majority of landfills are, along with the incineration and oil-burning power plants.
Here's a gallery of shots of the town I really like, particularly with how much I've been able to play with lighting. The run-down house with the green light in the backyard is Johnny's.
Assets I've used include the flag of Scotland, football goal posts and fields, and some really lovely brick walls which for some reason the base game does not offer. I was also able to add the vandalism I spoke about in my last post with a pack of graffiti assets, though keep in mind I am only using these decals as a general reference for where I want graffiti to go, but I'll be designing my own graffiti.
The main purpose of this entire process is to keep my backgrounds and settings consistent from one drawing to the next. I can change anything I want at will — whatever I need for the scenes, I can edit it into the map so I can keep it in scale with the rest of the setting. That's another thing, too: having people and cars moving around the map makes it so much easier for me to get a sense of scale (something I am not great at).
This process has been a lot of fun and has really taken a lot of pressure off of me in regards to devising the setting. I would highly recommend giving something like this a go if you've been stumped on how to flesh out your own fictional world/setting. I could even see this being useful for fantasy settings, so long as you found the right assets for it (check out this pack)!
This was a bit of a shorter post, but I'm sure it's welcome after last week. I'm very pleased with what I've been able to do and I really hope more people consider this method!
Finally, for those interested, here's a brief walk-through:
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