Now lets get to some nitty gritty, so what is steampunk exactly, and what kind of plugins are you going to see in the Iron Coast...

Stylist required

Essentially I want to talk about my motivations and ideas when it comes to the architectural style in the Iron Coast.

Architectural integrity is important to me, as I think it can bind a region’s settlements together to compound their obvious direct relation into a more rounded national identity. Not to look as if all the buildings were constructed at once, but more to look like there is some form of design progression, this implies a history to your cities making them feel all the more authentic and believable.

My original intention was to follow a steampunk theme in light of Antimonycat’s, romantic, industrial, shambling, parisienne city. If we analyse one of his photos we can see below, that there is in fact more industry in the picture than residential and commercial put together. Architecturally we have Industrial brick construction harking memories of the industrial revolution, but also some half timbered buildings near the top. Half-timbered construction was a technique that rose to fame through the Tudor and Elizabethan periods. The remainder of the buildings being industrial metalwork, this image of overly complicated yet somehow old fashioned machinery is archetypal of the steampunk ideology.

Also note the custom ferry sign and automata that have been edited postgame in photoshop, these touches help complete the images identity and leave no anachronisms to distract the viewer.

Steampunk itself is a sub genre of scifi/fantasy, with one of the key requisites being the prolonged use of steam beyond the advent of the internal combustion engine. The theme is stylistically Victorian although modern inventions are often shoe horned in as if they were invented at an earlier date, such as steam cars, airships, computers(digital or Babbage like mechanical) and on top of that inventions and theme that approach Vernian and Orwellian levels respectively. Often closely associated with cyberpunk, with its generally dystopian feeling and the ever presence of heavy industry, steampunk however can be utopian in nature.

Names of people & places are normally overindulgent and representative of the base country subculture you superimpose your steampunk onto, although picking names from between 100-500 years ago usually is the benchmark. Technical terms are flamboyant to say the least. Just try to imagine you were an inventor in 1780 and had just invented an Amerific Lodestone Reactioning Vessel (nuclear reactor to you and me). You can see the progression. As for dating things, general convention from what I’ve seen is that you call the date whatever the date is today and wind it back one hundred and fifty to two hundred years, this gives your the appropriate scope of the early Victorian period while still giving you scope to move into the future.

In light of that brief introduction to the genre, I’m now going to talk about some of the style decision I have made. When selecting my plugins I decided to go for a British subculture, in a similar fashion to Antimonycat, however unlike my inspiration I intend to have Germanic influences on that and try my best to steer clear of that parisienne romanticism. I want city to be tangibly grittier, darker and push that dystopian edge.

There is I should mention a third option, you can do steampunk with art deco and neoclassicism as your architectural base. This can be done extremely well and Mr. Glamazon made a couple of releases in this neoclassical steampunk style. See below for a more elaborate artistic impression.