Aww yeah. The Ulon Dosi village. I have to say I’m really happy with the look of this village.

It went through a lot of iterations and I had a hard time locking down an overriding and recognizable aesthetic. That’s generally important to me since I want different locations and races to have very clear visual cues, not just minor differences. I had settled on the round look of the main huts, with their hide roofs, wooden support arms, and central chimneys, but I didn’t have a larger idea to make the village itself something interesting.

Around the same time, I was reading a travel book on Morocco, since my wife and I were planning a vacation there, and I read something about some Berber villages in the High Atlas Mountains. The description mentioned terraced fields, and that suddenly became the feature I was looking for. I knew this particular Ulon Dosi village was going to be higher up in elevation and I had already established a very rocky look to the terrain, so it made complete sense to make the entire village composed of terraced levels.

I particularly like the idea I came up with to have some of the terraces run into and be contiguous with the rock bases of some huts.