Greetings,

Another fragment, trying to use what I learned doing the town from BOTK to have more of a city feeling area this time.

Something I've always kind of liked about videogames is that they almost exist at the final point of abstraction for ideas about "the big city". For example the look of certain places in New York in the 70s or whatever get used in exaggerated form for certain crime films - these films get turned into reference points for other films or for comic books, like Daredevil - those comicbooks spawn their own parody comics, like the Teenage Ninja Mutant Turtles - the three-degrees-removed "big city" of the ninja turtles becomes a totally abstract and hostile brick and concrete labyrinth for the tie-in TMNT NES games - et cetera.

I like how strange the effect can be but it can also get kind of dehumanizing to take this real place where people live and turn it into a cartoon prison dimension filled with Street Thugs. So, something I've been playing around with is trying to make these areas outlandish enough that they feel like a caricature of a nonexistent city instead of one which actually exists, inspired by stuff like the Formulary For A New Urbanism www.bopsecrets.org/SI/Chtcheglov.htm

As the levels get visually denser they get a bit slower to make as well... the last one will probably take 10 years to build and be so visually cluttered that it's impossible to make anything out onscreen... ha ha ha... just kidding.... Unless ?