Road Assets 2.0 (Patreon)

Hello all! 

So a good while back ago when I was first exploring what it looked like to be releasing smaller packs of assets more regularly, I put out a series of Road Assets to supplement the ones already found in the original Forest Assets pack. At the time, these were my attempt to not just create a greater variety of road pieces, but my approach was steeped in the philosophy of using road pieces to build into each other. While that may seem obvious, there were lots of hurdles that approach produced for me: all of the road widths needed to be the same in order to 'link up' correctly and the textures within them needed to be able to overlap without being obvious for starters.

While the solutions to those hurdles in the original Road Assets were satisfactory, I never really felt like they were as elegant as could be. Many of you are likely similarly aware of a 'Dirt Road' photoshop brush I shared as a part of the City Assets Pack released this last summer. This works of course, but results in a very specific aesthetic, requires one to have access to Photoshop and be willing to draw out their roads by hand, and takes a bit more time than the traditional 'asset'.

So with that context, here we have: Road Assets 2.0. This time, rather than trying to give you pieces to build your own roads (and therefore have to encounter the aforementioned hurdles) I wanted to instead sidestep those hurdles and make the road-usage experience more efficient. To do that I started by using a combination of several different Photoshop brushes to create an entire page-sized 'earth texture' to populate the interiors of the road shapes (this Earth Texture is share as a part of the assets pack for your use); the original dirt textures from the previous road assets were all hand painted every time. Then, I drew out 35 different full-page road iterations, intentionally trying to draw them with an outline that was a bit more ambiguous and not quite so obviously 'grass-like' so these could be easily used on any background texture (grass, snow, sand, cobblestone, etc.). 

The result is seen before you! 35 full-page road assets (where previously there were only 5 'road combos') that you can easily drop right on top of any background texture and in enough varieties to serve any number of different roadside scenarios you could dream up for your players. While testing and playing around with these I took one of the results and brought it to a more completed state using a variety of different assets I've created previously, resulting in the 'roadside tower' map you'll see also in this post (and in the pack).

I hope you enjoy! If you have any specific feedback on these roads or the design process as I've outlined it here I'd love to hear it--happy mapping!