I'd been more than a little hesitant to model anything past head height.
At the very beginning of this last rethink, I brought the setting to the underground because I could naturally control the depiction of height.
My problem began when I decided that I were going to make scenes reasonably tight. It wasn't going to be a wide open city, but a claustrophobic one. Corridors were going to be narrow. However, a fixed isometric viewpoint makes it more difficult to see the ground if the walls rose any higher than the nominal height of characters.
Of course, there were ways to show character behind walls without actually messing about with their visibilities. But if walls rise too much, you lose all sense of where the ground is if you don't start making tall elements invisible. Visibility handling is a potentially complicated feature (i.e. source of bugs) and I was all for avoiding complicated features if I could help it. Strangely though -- I didn't actually think about this before -- I had already a working solution for handling this in Godot. I think I had it in my mind that I wasn't entirely sure that I could apply the technique reliably on a more complicated environment especially since my test scene was a simple SubRail car.
In any case, my obstinacy was butting heads with my own aesthetics.
In the first place, when everything is head height, it looks pretty flat.
Again, I had justified this by saying that they're all underground, and I'm trying for a claustrophobic angle. But the flatness is working against it. It may or may not look underground, it may or may not look dense, but it's flat and boring.
I went back to the starting point which was the entrance to the apartments. The apartments were supposed to be a building (or a group of them). I had forbidden myself to depict the building for reasons aforesaid, so it was going to be shown as a short building whose top will be black.
I thought, 'maybe that'd be enough'. But as I went through the rest of the map nothing felt right. The map looked stupid, everything seem uninspired even though I was wracking my brains on making interesting floor and room layouts. But I couldn't even figure out what these rooms were! There was nothing exterior that indicated what the interior might be.
I was feeling desperate to make it work. But I did not question the height of structures because that had been a technical consideration on my part and I had it written it off.
I told myself that I wanted to see some life, some dimesionality when I'm looking at the map. I want to see buildings; I want to see their facades and I want to imagine what may be inside the buildings even if I can't possibly enter them.
So I started depicting taller structures. I started with the apartment.
And then I went all over town with the other bits.
I found the new map visually more interesting, but more importantly, I could start imagining what each building could be. I started having a little fun, and getting funny random ideas.
In any case, I re-learned a lesson: I have to nurture or encourage inspiration whilst working. I had a technical consideration, and I held inspiration subordinate to it. If I take the fun out of making a map -- I did so when I imposed all structures be head height -- it's certainly not going to be a good map.
It wasn't totally unreasonable for me to be a bit cautious of technical problems. But I think I consider technical issues too early before the game's aesthetics can have a chance to develop. It's probably a very common problem with developers who are doing both the art and the programming.
I did speculate on how to overcome visibility issues, by the way, and I have good feeling that it will pan out. This has to do directly with being able to view the structures' parts directly in the DCC.
The gif below is a simple reveal of parts that I've indicated are above head height. These parts are not grouped so that they will become invisible independently. As I said, there is a visibility handling already in place, so these elements get included as those whose visibilities will be affected.
There's another level to this. Not tall parts need to be made invisible; only those that have the potential of blocking the ground need to be made invisible. By looking through the ortho cam that's set up, I can model parts accordingly.
