Hello everyone! With Beach Properties out, it’s time for a mini-series of development diaries covering our process and giving you a peek at the new assets. In this first installment, we’ll talk about what an asset pack is and how we approached the development of Beach Properties alongside the development of the game, modding support, and bug fixes.
Asset packs are a new type of official content that opens up the chance to add more building variations to the game and bring you more ways to let your city stand out. Our first pack, Beach Properties, has something new for your peaceful low density residential areas and while nothing forces you to zone these buildings near the waves, these assets might be just the touch your waterfront needs.
Beach Properties includes 60 new buildings across two new low density residential zones, one for North America and one for Europe. The zones contain the familiar 5 levels and using various props and decorations, we have managed to sneak in 24 additional variations for each theme. The pack also includes six glorious Signature Buildings plus a large number of props that will hopefully not only be nice to look at but also very useful when you get your hands on the in-game editor in the not-so-distant future.
Who doesn’t enjoy a waterfront view?
With the Ultimate Edition for Cities: Skylines II we have announced a few different types of DLCs, so let’s take a moment to talk about the two types we’ll bring you. Both asset packs and expansions present a way for us to bring you new content to enhance your cities, but they do so in different ways. Where expansions have a broad concept and bring you new gameplay mechanics to expand the game as a whole, asset packs take a more narrow focus allowing you to pick and choose exactly what fits your playstyle and cities. This allows our amazing art team to create stunning new buildings for you while our programmers have been working diligently on the performance improvements and bug fixes you have received since the game was released.
Before Cities: Skylines II was even announced, we had picked the concept for this pack, though work didn’t properly start on the assets themselves until closer to the release last October. As you may have already spotted from the names of the first DLCs, we have focused our attention on waterfronts and seaside cities. In Cities: Skylines we weren’t able to do much with the waterfronts, so going into Cities: Skylines II, it felt like a natural choice to start expanding the game there.
With the theme selected, our artists found references and started work on the pack. As it includes a new low density residential zone for each of the two themes, we already knew roughly how many buildings we would need. The next step in the process is what’s called “white boxing” where we outline the basic geometric shapes of the buildings, like a 3D draft that allows us to flesh out the scale and make sure it fits within the existing game assets.
Work-in-progress models for the European Waterfront Housing
From there we started to iterate on the details that are iconic for the architectural styles we were inspired by. We’ll explore that in more detail in the next development diary tomorrow as we talk about what inspired the Beach Properties and how we created the assets. Until then, we hope you enjoyed this peek at the creation of an asset pack.