Following on last week's character sketches, here are some notes on the town design from Blood Of The Killer, focusing on the outside parts since those are the ones that I had trouble figuring out.

I don't remember if I posted it here before, but the initial inspiration for this game was actually a bunch of the Henri Rousseu paintings I was looking at for reference in Flesh Of The Killer. That game was mostly focused on his "jungle" themed work, but I found I also really enjoyed the more prosaic ones he did of small factory towns in the french countryside. There was such a strong sense of mood and place from those paintings I felt like it'd be fun to drop all of my other plans and try to do something with a similar setting instead.

It took me a while to figure out how to get a sense of outdoors-iness with my limited 3d skills. I spent a while looking at the good website noclip which lets you move a camera around a bunch of 3d level meshes to see how eg a bunch of N64 games did it. At first I tried to make a bunch of prefab buildings and just drop them around a blank map, but it was hard to group them that way into something that felt naturally dense - the way that worked best for me was just using buildings as walls around some open space, and then putting prefab buildings / clouds / hills behind them to give a sense of extra depth. There aren't too many open areas in the game, but it was fun trying to work out the problem.

The first screenshot here is a layout for the "town square" area - the next few are my earlier attempts at playing with 3d space and what the town should look like. Initially there was going to be a lot more green, or cobblestones, etc, but I found it looked best when I kept everything fairly abstract - sticking to offwhite houses and streets and orange roofs.

After those are one of the Rousseau paintings that got me started, some others by Mario Sironi that I used as reference, a screenshot from the surrealist horror movie "Valerie & Her Week of Wonders" which has a similar setting, and finally some sketches I did for the prefab buildings.

Well, there it all is in more detail than anybody needed to know. Peace...