The verdict on the first building set was “horrendous dune style”, and it is a fair hit. Smooth pale domes, plain columns, blank walls. Nothing moving and nothing to see.
They read as architecture where they should read as industry. A colony of them is a very calm place where apparently nothing is happening, which is an odd result for a game whose entire first minute is supposed to be about a world that is already running.
The rule that was missing
Look at what Galactic Battlegrounds does that this did not. Its resource buildings are colour-coded by what they work, and the material is piled up where you can see it. You know what a structure does from across the map without reading a word, because the thing it produces is sitting on it.
Ours had none of that. Every structure was the same pale stone whatever it did, and the only way to tell an Extractor from an Archive was to have learned the silhouette.
So: the resource is visible, and it is the loudest thing on the building.
Ore spills gold from a chute. Crystal is racked in teal. The Harvester stacks timber and green bales, the Farm grows rows of red-gold grain, the Solar Array is deep blue glass. The colour is the same one the ground uses for that surface, so recognising the building and recognising the terrain are the same act.
And the second half: make them machines
Exposed gearing. Brass pistons and collars. Riveted bracing, pipework, gantries, ladders, chutes, counterweights. A silhouette with things sticking out of it.
The test is blunt: if it could be a museum, it is wrong.
Two things that were not done, on purpose
The brief said more metal. Half of that is taken and half is refused, because dark iron and soot belong to the Forge — and the contrast between pale stone and dark iron is how a player will tell two civilizations apart on the same map. Stone stays the frame; brass is the machinery. Going further would have solved the dune problem by deleting the faction.
And nothing glows. Every vent, slot and furnace mouth in these is painted flat black. Look at the Reactor: those slots are empty. Code fills them at runtime, and a sprite with the light painted in cannot be animated — which is the rule an image generator breaks most often and the most expensive one to fix afterwards.
What this actually costs
These are concepts, not production art, and the gap is not small. The rendering is heavier than the shipped library — thicker outlines, more illustrative shading — so one of these standing beside the current Command Core fails the eighth acceptance test, the one that just asks does this belong in the same game.
Which makes adopting them a decision about house style rather than a decision about six sprites. Either these come down to match what exists, or everything already cut goes back through at this weight. The second is the honest reading of the brief, and it is about a day per building.
The briefs are version controlled beside the images, and they are treated as source code. Same camera, same light, same palette clauses on every one — that is the only reason eight separate generations look like they came from one place.