Tone and aesthetic

Look · Voice · What the game is not · References ·

Look

Voxels, but not blocks: the world is stored at 32 voxels per metre and buildings are cut to the thickness they were built to, at their real size beside people 1.7 m tall. Plinths, sills, door hoods, capped ridges and chimney pots; jettied upper storeys over the street; each house washed, framed and painted as its owner chose; a tower, a portal and painted glass on the church; a wheel on the mill; the frayed verge of a laid street. Enough that a building says what it is before its label does.

The light is the weather’s. A summer noon is not a February one, an overcast day is flat and grey, a storm is nearly dark, snow lies on upward faces, and when it has been below freezing for a week the river goes hard. The era lens strips all of that away and paints the city by the century that laid it, in six earth colours, and that view is the point of the whole project.

A pixel-art style draws the same 3D scene through a small orthographic canvas as if it were painted in sprites: a sprite ramp of five tones per material, selective outlines, banded sky, camera resting on eight headings. It never replaces terrain and buildings with a tile map.

Voice

The chronicle speaks in plain past-tense sentences: The river rose two courses, covered forty paces of the low ground, and put water into six buildings. Hunger: the city ate 62% of what it needed. An embankment was raised along both banks. The panels report, the labels are quiet, and the interface never stands over the city: the panels dock to the edges and the world gets whatever rectangle they leave.

What the game is not

Not a real-time strategy game: there is no combat to control, no units to select, no build menu. Not a city painter: you cannot place a building, and the only direct edit costs legitimacy and leaves the footings in the ground. Not a planet: one city, one site, never more. Not a story generator with named heroes: the story is what the simulation leaves in the ground.

References

Sectional drawings of European towns; the Ordnance Survey’s successive editions; Banished’s sense of a village that has to feed itself; Dwarf Fortress’s conviction that history is what happened, not what was written.

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This chapter is docs/design/09-tone.md in the repository; the site renders the file as it is.