Figure I’ll just keep posting here for now cause why not?
Also, I guess Catbox REALLY doesn’t like embedded videos, so again, you might have to open the webms in a new tab for them work.
Nighthawks
Map: Smooth Dirt
December 2021
You mighta saw this from the last winter condo contest. I wanted to copy something more ambitious. So came Nighthawks, a painting that probably resonates with anyone else playing this game at 2 A.M.
What I thought was going to be a simple recreation ended up requiring tons of artistic license. To start, the building in this painting is allegedly not based on an actual location, so there’s been a lot of debate on it’s actual shape: Is the diner a square corner, or a wedge? In the end, I went with right-angle. Also the painting doesn’t show it having an entrance, so I had to decide on how to do that too.
Also, what about the rest of the scene outside of the painting? I didn’t want to make just a panorama, I was going to construct the whole block so you really felt like you’re stepping foot into it. I noticed another Edward Hopper painting, “Sunday Morning,” had buildings that were nearly identical to the background of Nightawks, so I used that as a reference to fill out the back wall.
For the 4th wall, I ended making a fancy theater just cause I wanted something cool to look at through the gigantic window from within the diner. Ironically, it ended up being the biggest concentration if effort for this build. Doing some research, I had completely forgotten how going to the movies use to be an event that you’d dress up for.
My personal favorite part of this condo was using solid black canvas objects to create the silhoutte of buildings in the background.
This video tour is from the ‘Christmas’ version that I redecorated to enter the contest, but the only difference is a bunch of snow piles and garlands tbh.
Mango Dyson
Map: Smooth Dirt
Early 2022
Once done with Nighthawks, I was very much sick of trying to match the sophistication of a classic painting and started this not long after.
If you’ve ever played any of the Project Diva games, you know just about every song has a crazy, surreal stage for Miku to jam on. That was the main idea here; I wanted a really high-energy venue for dance music. The pyramid one in my previous post fit that bill, but I wanted something more upbeat.
One of my goals was to make it almost impossible to look somewhere without motion happening on screen.
While I was building it, I was listening to the Let’s Tap soundtrack (an ultimately plain & obscure mini-game compilation for the Wii that had a strangely fantastic OST.) My friend looked up the composer and found his side project, “Missile Chewbaca” which had us discovering one of my favorite albums I’ve heard in a while. It ended up being great inspiration for finishing this map.
The addition of the “physics-al media” item has made it so I can actually put the music I want people to listen to on the maps themselves, which makes me very happy. I’ve since updated most of my condos with a little table that has all the music that helped inspire me
I’m currently working on whats probably going to become my new favorite.
However, I’m finding a lot of people don’t even know workshop condos exist since it’s tucked away past the main menu with no HUB access, so I don’t think I’m going to ‘officially’ publish more condos until the video store is added. Until then, I’m hoping to have a couple new ones completed for it’s grand opening : )