I threw together basically enough buildings to fill the entire city space, as well as put up a wall (so I could make a hole in the wall). It is kinda crazy how fast Rove City went from a totally open/empty space into "wow this is a tight city and there's this interesting corner here and there's a few buildings for a shy character to hide behind...".
I also ended up drafting a blacksmith's place to add to a new location. I think having an idle game in mind helps to come up with ideas that anchor the world down a bit.
Honestly the mental shift from "stickers on a board" to "static visuals vs dynamic entities" feels AMAZING. There's an abundant feeling of authorship where I sketch out static pieces that define the vibe and conceptual affordances of a location, and that gives room to author characters via dynamic "agency" by having characters that appear in different places at different times.
And either way, the world gets filled almost superlinearly. Cuz like, if you put a building there, it opens a lot of intrigue: what could this building hold? who maintains it? Who uses it? Who defies what it's used for?
Whereas before I was feeling stuck because a single NPC occupies and expresses charcater in a single 1x1 tile of this space. And I was left wondering if I had to come up with 64 characters to fit a 8x8 space...and even then, would it even be fun to interact with each of these one at a time.
I've changed my dev structure so that I'm uploading files from my local repo. Not excatly git yet, but I'm honestly still juggling the neocities and idle game versions of this site and they aren't quite merged together yet.