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The southern bazaar: changing what is there, not how it looks

The last pass over the citadel does not touch the finish: it changes the content. A stable and a henhouse to the west, grilles on the gates and seven open stalls where there were closed workshops.

Published on 1 min read

The southern bazaar: seven open stalls with coloured awnings replace the earlier workshops and sheds
The southern bazaar: seven open stalls with coloured awnings replace the earlier workshops and sheds

The citadel was painted and evened out. This last pass does not touch the finish: it changes the content.

The west wall gains a stable and a henhouse where a long house and a well used to be, the north and south gates get iron grilles, and the south becomes a bazaar of seven open stalls instead of closed workshops.

The southern bazaar: seven open stalls with coloured awnings replace the earlier workshops and sheds

Small changes on paper and large ones on the ground: a place with a market, corrals and animals feels inhabited; one with shuttered workshops does not. A shuttered workshop is a façade; an open stall is somebody working.

And this is how the place where the game begins ends up:

The finished citadel: octagonal wall with fourteen towers, central cathedral, cobbled plaza, bazaar to the south, corrals to the west, fields to the north-east and the river with its bridge to the east

The scope

On the ground it is roughly 149 × 84 metres of world, and all of it is walked. The working rule was a single one: the drawing rules. Collisions are not placed by eye, they are measured against the image; if the drawing shows a path crossing a field, that path can be walked.

We started by assembling the place out of pieces and ended up painting it like a picture, and both were needed: the pieces so the measurements would be true, the picture so the place would have character.

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