After discussing with the coder on the project we came to the conclusion that they setting and personality of the game would better suit a medieval 'cosy' architectural style than anything else. I began development on this building (below) to see how it could possibly look with the style we are aiming for.
I think it works well, the colours obviously need work and we need to consider how players interact with buildings (do they go inside, screen fade to black and load up in a new scene which is in the shop?) or do we keep everything in-game, restricting the buildings interiors to the actual scale of the building in the world.
The buildings features are very simple and clean, and the slight displaced angle of the polygons allow enough detail to be captured (such as the roof) to give the building volume. The only down side to this particular model is that it is all attached together and this would mean I would have to manually construct every building for the game as a seperate mesh, for optimisation particularly for mobile devices I think it is worth looking in to modular asset development (see next image).
Learning from the development of the previous model I took a different approach to the construction of this building. All the assets used to piece the model together have been fully optimised to reduce unnecessary rendering within the engine. This new system means realistically the only 'one off' meshes that will need modelling each time will be the roof shape and the buildings shape (to make a cut for the door). The additional benefit is I can now texture each individual piece of the building within Unity and not have to have a set UV map for each building within the game.
It also means I can make large range of different modular pieces for each section, for example : As the player progresses through the game and their level increases, the visual aesthetics of the village also increases, this means I can now swap between different versions of windows/doors/stairs on demand. So perhaps at level 2 the windows look better, but you'll have to wait till level 3 for the stairs to improve.
