Above are the 4 different types are Toll Buildings that help populate the world in Virtual Battlegrounds.
Very early on in my time working on Virtual Battlegrounds, around the same time as the Gas Station, I was also tasked on making a small, guard shack-like building to place into the world but were later taken out due to a change in direction. I'm perfectly fine with that decision when it happened due to the growth I've taken while being on this team and working on my skillset & approach to design.
I was given the opportunity to redo my work on those buildings and completely change up what I did before with something new and fun. Originally for this redo, I pitched 2 different variants of buildings. However, after getting feedback and review over what I had at the time, this blossomed into 4 different kinds of buildings, each with their own quirk.
When the question of theming came up, I got an idea of having some be pre-apocalypse and post-apocalypse. Thanks to that, two of the buildings are pre and the other two are post. I feel like these give a refreshing outlook onto the landscape we currently have and with whatever we plan on adding in the future as well as adding a different way of playing certain areas of the map. Before fully building out these structures, I did a solid look around the landscape and came up with ideas for what would be fun on areas that need something new but not too large.
Above is the smallest of the new buildings that is more similar to a guard shack. This is a solution to the other structures as those are on the taller side that larger vehicles like military trucks would be able to go through. This structure can be found almost anywhere on the roads of our map and can provide a short bout of solace for a player in need. In line with the theming, this is a pre-apocalypse building.
Onto the larger buildings, this is the one of the post-apocalypse buildings. The main part of my thinking when it comes to these buildings of this theme is more of a thrown together modification of an existing building. Due to that, I wanted these buildings to be fun and have pros & cons with them having their own identity. Having that freedom of choice on how to approach a situation is an important part of these buildings.
Above is the other post-apocalypse Toll Building. It's the same base structure as the one above it but with different additions to it. I wanted for each structure (aside from the Guard Shack) to be similar in overall construction but offer something new and different from the other ones to the point that the player can immediately tell from a far distance what the structure is.
This structure is the last and the largest one of the ones in this collection. It is also the other pre-apocalypse building alongside the Guard Shack. The above building is the only one with a canopy and I wanted that to be the case given the theming. This building is relatively big and can provide a strong position but it is also fairly vulnerable due to the amount of windows. The early iterations had many more windows but that did not translate well to gameplay and the look of the building itself.
I'm content with how these buildings came out and placing the props in and outside of them really ties in the style that I wanted to achieve with the structures. The strong contrast of organized and disorganized buildings and having multiple ways to approach certain areas of the map now are aspects that I aimed for here.