Incoming HOLYWALLOFTEXTBATMAN!
Wrote this bit while I was in your town:
Personal preference - west side of your plaza, you've got a 2-tile path with a rock in the middle of it. Is this a permanent rock? I find it makes the flow a bit awkward. If it's a permanent rock I'd have tried to work around it, perhaps by moving the path up one tile and rebuilding your fountain below. No point having a 2-tile path if you can't use both tiles.
It does feel like you've got a lot going on with different path tiles. If it was me, again, personal preference but I'd blitz the lot and just use one fairly neutral path, let your PWPs and flowers do the talking.
AUGH PIETRO ABORT ABORT
ahem.
I like the alternating red and white flowers on the way down to the south beach ramp, more stuff like that would be great. It's just a little thing that adds a lot of visual interest, and it draws more attention to the route so you know where to go. The bathtile pattern on the beach is funny, I like that as a feature. Are you keeping those flowers on the beach or are they just there to get them out of the way right now?
I didn't see your town when you first made the thread because I didn't have dream suite at the time, but I can see where you took all that bamboo out and that must have opened things up a lot.
My thoughts:
This may or may not help, personal preference etc. At the moment I feel like there's not much flow. By that I mean it's not really clear where to go or what to do - there's no path from the station, for instance, so you have to sort of strike out randomly, walk to the left oh there's a picnic spot, walk onto the tiles for the picnic spot oh I can see something just south of it I guess I'll go there... I got onto your main paths that way but it felt kind of illicit, like I wasn't supposed to be there.
The part of your town that I feel works best flow-wise, is the south/west island area. I come over the lowest bridge and instinctively turn south, follow the 2-tile path by some villager houses, then go south again and walk along the cliffs, passing by a neat moai head. I go up from there, past the lighthouse (shouldn't those two be switched though?
), and then things get a bit awkward because I can see another section of path behind Camofrog's but I can't directly get on it. It's a diagonal, I've been well trained not to step on bare grass, and Camofrog's house is in the way as well. So instead I turn right, walk up by the fountain, oh whoops another diagonal. I'll go east over the two-tile rose paths instead and circle around by Deli's house. There's a nice open area with a bench here where I can wander freely, I like this bit. I have to cheat again and walk over bare grass to get onto the next section, but then I double back and find there's a better, straight route below the pond, which I hadn't seen because I was distracted by everything else. If it was my town I'd knock out the diagonal route above the pond and just use that convenient straight one. It might seem counterintuitive, but my feeling is if you just have one route to get to something, you free up more space AND you have more freedom to do cool stuff with that one route. Maybe you just happen to like more path-heavy towns, and there's nothing wrong with that, but in that case you could consider having one tile that's a designated "walking path" and line the route with others to be "decoration paths".
I'll talk about what I did with my town - this is not to be taken as instructions for what to do with yours, just a different method. My town has been very slow to develop because I never add anything without deciding on exactly what it's for and how people are going to get to and from it. The first thing I did with was to make routes. Major arteries are three tiles wide, areas with heavy traffic are two tiles wide, and lanes to houses are one tile.
I figured that since everyone is going to come out of the station, I'll make that the most important bit. The path leading from the station to the plaza is the most impressive part of the town, lined with trees, bushes and flowers, and it's 3 tiles wide. From there, a 2-tile path springs off to my ReTail/Cafe/Police-station spot, because that's the next place people will want to go. The important thing is all the paths go somewhere interesting and then circle back. There are no dead ends. If you get on the path from the station to ReTail it will lead you past the cafe, police station and north beach ramp, down and round to the town hall, then onto the plaza. If you decide to be an iconoclast and go east from the station, you'll go through a fruit orchard (where a sign tells you PICK YOUR OWN if you want), over the bridge, down the eastern side of the town past villager houses, then back across the bridge onto the plaza.
I've just made a dream address thingy if you want to try mine out. 6000-3509-2919. I haven't built a lot of PWPs but all the ones I have have been placed with consideration to how they'll change the flow. There's something a bit strange going on in the south at the moment, tl;dr Marcel landed in the middle of something but he's leaving now so I'm starting to add the stuff I wanted there.
Wrote this bit while I was in your town:
Personal preference - west side of your plaza, you've got a 2-tile path with a rock in the middle of it. Is this a permanent rock? I find it makes the flow a bit awkward. If it's a permanent rock I'd have tried to work around it, perhaps by moving the path up one tile and rebuilding your fountain below. No point having a 2-tile path if you can't use both tiles.
It does feel like you've got a lot going on with different path tiles. If it was me, again, personal preference but I'd blitz the lot and just use one fairly neutral path, let your PWPs and flowers do the talking.
AUGH PIETRO ABORT ABORT
ahem.
I like the alternating red and white flowers on the way down to the south beach ramp, more stuff like that would be great. It's just a little thing that adds a lot of visual interest, and it draws more attention to the route so you know where to go. The bathtile pattern on the beach is funny, I like that as a feature. Are you keeping those flowers on the beach or are they just there to get them out of the way right now?
I didn't see your town when you first made the thread because I didn't have dream suite at the time, but I can see where you took all that bamboo out and that must have opened things up a lot.
My thoughts:
This may or may not help, personal preference etc. At the moment I feel like there's not much flow. By that I mean it's not really clear where to go or what to do - there's no path from the station, for instance, so you have to sort of strike out randomly, walk to the left oh there's a picnic spot, walk onto the tiles for the picnic spot oh I can see something just south of it I guess I'll go there... I got onto your main paths that way but it felt kind of illicit, like I wasn't supposed to be there.
The part of your town that I feel works best flow-wise, is the south/west island area. I come over the lowest bridge and instinctively turn south, follow the 2-tile path by some villager houses, then go south again and walk along the cliffs, passing by a neat moai head. I go up from there, past the lighthouse (shouldn't those two be switched though?
), and then things get a bit awkward because I can see another section of path behind Camofrog's but I can't directly get on it. It's a diagonal, I've been well trained not to step on bare grass, and Camofrog's house is in the way as well. So instead I turn right, walk up by the fountain, oh whoops another diagonal. I'll go east over the two-tile rose paths instead and circle around by Deli's house. There's a nice open area with a bench here where I can wander freely, I like this bit. I have to cheat again and walk over bare grass to get onto the next section, but then I double back and find there's a better, straight route below the pond, which I hadn't seen because I was distracted by everything else. If it was my town I'd knock out the diagonal route above the pond and just use that convenient straight one. It might seem counterintuitive, but my feeling is if you just have one route to get to something, you free up more space AND you have more freedom to do cool stuff with that one route. Maybe you just happen to like more path-heavy towns, and there's nothing wrong with that, but in that case you could consider having one tile that's a designated "walking path" and line the route with others to be "decoration paths".I'll talk about what I did with my town - this is not to be taken as instructions for what to do with yours, just a different method. My town has been very slow to develop because I never add anything without deciding on exactly what it's for and how people are going to get to and from it. The first thing I did with was to make routes. Major arteries are three tiles wide, areas with heavy traffic are two tiles wide, and lanes to houses are one tile.
I figured that since everyone is going to come out of the station, I'll make that the most important bit. The path leading from the station to the plaza is the most impressive part of the town, lined with trees, bushes and flowers, and it's 3 tiles wide. From there, a 2-tile path springs off to my ReTail/Cafe/Police-station spot, because that's the next place people will want to go. The important thing is all the paths go somewhere interesting and then circle back. There are no dead ends. If you get on the path from the station to ReTail it will lead you past the cafe, police station and north beach ramp, down and round to the town hall, then onto the plaza. If you decide to be an iconoclast and go east from the station, you'll go through a fruit orchard (where a sign tells you PICK YOUR OWN if you want), over the bridge, down the eastern side of the town past villager houses, then back across the bridge onto the plaza.
I've just made a dream address thingy if you want to try mine out. 6000-3509-2919. I haven't built a lot of PWPs but all the ones I have have been placed with consideration to how they'll change the flow. There's something a bit strange going on in the south at the moment, tl;dr Marcel landed in the middle of something but he's leaving now so I'm starting to add the stuff I wanted there.
