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Chicago-Themed Terrain

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Simon:
Here's the promised feedback on the steel.

Steel adheres mostly to the 16-grid. Nice! In particular, the big steel truss square is 48x48 now.

You don't have overly many steel pieces, that's nice and plays ball with the editor's steel browser that merges all installed steel into a single view.

Shape nitpick: Some steel is 6x32 or 32x6. That is quirky, but okay, if you want 6-wide bars instead of 8-wide, then that's how it is and designers will have to use the 2-grid instead of the 8-grid.

Theoretically, you can make the bar's bitmap 32x8 with only the central 6 pixels solid, and 1+1 transparent rows at either side. Such a tile feels misalinged unless it had an odd shape to begin with, but you don't have odd-shaped decor; you have rectangular steel. I think the 32x6 is more honest.

Nails: Good! When we look at the steel, we see the nails, and will likely consider the tile steel.

(Now your steel isn't the hardest steel to recognize anymore. I'd like geoo's white steel pipes to get similar nails, or at least small bumps. Those pipes are hard to recognize as steel until you've memorized them.)

Color: The main steel problem wouldn't be in the steel tile itself, but rather a feature of the the overall set. You have diggable grey houses, diggable grey earth, diggable brown railway truss, but then greyish-brown steel. The steel's color still blends in.

E.g., see attached screenshot. We recognize the steel bar clearly as steel once we've decided to look for steel and found that steel. But it doesn't jump into our eyes. With all the colorful action, we're prone to hit the steel by accident.

I don't have a good recommendation. You could make the steel white-and-dark-grey with even glarier nails, but then you'll kill your mood. After all, you want steel trusses that fit the scenery.

Compare with other sets: Other tiles aren't as colorful or mini-detailed, or have much larger details. Grey steel with nubs sticks out in those other sets.


That's the feedback on steel. More feedback on the entire set to come, again with a deadline: Tuseday, April 25th.

-- Simon

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