A long time ago, I wrote of an ambitious pixel art depicting a very detailed townscape that would had top all other previous works I have done before, proceeding to begin work on December 2003. Originally promising to complete it within months, the project has ended up in development hell, dragging on for 4 years. As months and years passed, other pixel artists would release similar large submissions onto dA, while I slowly drifted away from my project as I was preoccupied with other affairs. Fast forward to July 2008, and I felt it was time to start over and cease work on this townscape.

There are several reasons I've decided to ditch this particular picture:

1. My knowledge of urban development has improved considerably. As a result, I felt the grid-based layout presented here is no longer suitable to depict an urban centre.

2. I had no proper planning of this project. All the time, I focused on adding way too many buildings at once, believing that I could complete details here and there, but found out the amount of existing buildings in the picture proved to intimidating for me to work on. It would be more practical to complete one block at a time.

3. Proportion. There is simply not enough diversity in terrain, with way too much focus on flat land. The body of water on the bottom left side was meant to depict a river, but it proved to look terrible, as was an attempt to illustrate a bridge running over it.

4. Colours. I didn't regulate colour use, and I have no idea how many of them are present in this image. The focus was to minimise the number of colours and reduce the picture's filesize as much as possible, but it became clear I may had overlooked certain greys, browns and reds over the course of 4 years, and I have no way of locating these stray colours.

In summary, this project contracted a shitload of fail, raep and AIDS.

This iteration of the "townscape", the latest available version, has remained untouched since December 2007, essentially marking the project's fourth year of development. I hereby license this image, along with its supplementary crap, in Creative Commons (see licensing).

I'm starting over and reusing whatever useful techniques I've learned from this old monster.