Will It Build? aka The Grayest Mockup

 

All these png assets I made for constructing rooms and stuff—will they fit together even remotely? Let's find out. Lord knows it won't be exhaustive, but at least we can get a basic proof of concept. Also making big mockups with notes is more considerate to Nate than dump-trucking a hundred images into source control and assuming it'll be obvious how to create an architecture system from them.

beep beep GLHF

This mockup is especially fun because it's entirely made up of linked images. So when I'm like, "Hm, the floor should have a stronger top edge," I can go edit those floor images, re-export them, and the mockup gets updated.

It is not especially fun because I haven't made any other assets yet, so everything here is pretty "backgroundy" when it comes to gameplay, and I need to go against my instinct to crank up the saturation and contrast, at least for now.

Other discoveries:

• Oh, I guess we'll want two "kinds" of stone stairs, one you can walk in front of and one you can't. Does the game try to just build the right kind of stair based on the context or will you have to specify it? Don't know yet.
• Related open question: How much headroom do stairs need? Could colonists even build stairs that they couldn't go up?
• What happens when you divide a room in half with a wall, but then there's still a walkable-looking floor underneath it? Will a janky little cap-image on the wall mostly fix that? 
• What things do you kinda want spilling over the edges of the grid and what things do you not want doing that?
• Hm looks like ladders will want a little half-height cap on the top but not the bottom, interesting.
• Uh oh, what does it look like when colonists are in the middle of building a floor or staircase? Do they complete things square by square like Rimworld does? That doesn't fit great with the way we want to tile edges, but it might be necessary. Because otherwise, if you don't fill in any actual pngs until the whole project is finished, you're punished for taking on bigger chunks of work at a time.