Interesting Shops from a Generic building

I have been very busy with Leilani sprucing up the Village as per my last Blog post. Gotta make it something special, a place where people feel good right from the off.

I needed shops in the Village for obvious reasons, and we did not really want to go with fully unique designs for each one. Several reasons include uniformity, meaning that a Shop should look like a shop and not say a House or Barn etc. Another reason is that saving on memory is still important if possible. So we started out with a Generic building as you can see below.

fig 1: Generic shop building artwork

As you can tell the generic shop is also grey scaled. This is very handy for colorization, so we can easily associate a yellow building with Gems for example and a Brown building with Animals etc. Giving a profession/shop a unique color scheme is nice when referring to them in game if we have too. also I would mention that color variety is very cheap on memory.

Now we currently have 4 shops within the Village space and so we needed to add them and then make them more Unique and identifiable. In the next image you will see two shops doing just that.

fig 2: Fully Unique'd shops

From the image above you can see we added the nameplate banners and then we added some in game graphics to the shops to show off exactly what they are about. We have not yet finished these shops, but they are very close to being done. In the above example you can of course see how good a simple recolor job is.
One last thing is that we needed animation and each of these shops has it in some form or other. The above ones have the gems in the window spinning, and the Ducks jumping for joy in their window.

These are in game graphics and so are already very cheap to use., and did you notice the shadow parrots painted onto the Animals shop? Another easy usage of an existing graphic that we simple colored to zero, and then alpha's to about 30%.

Have fun out there,
Da Voodoochief