Totally Normal Town: Final Roundup!!

 I've finally finished editing the latest batch of TotallyNormalTown videos!!

Here's the "4th Wall Breaker" where I explained all of the buildings in the current iteration of our little sity-under-the-stairs -- what I was going for and my plans for the future:

 

 

The above is a companion video to the series of posts I wrote with explanations of the theme of the town and the various buildings:

•  LeGo Urbanist!! 
• Elsa's Totally Normal Castle 
• Welcome to our Little Japanese Corner! 
• Straddling the Tectonic Plates (again)! 
• For the Love of the Arts! 
• Power and Construction! 
• Time for Space College!! 

Nico has decided that it's time to wrap up the Totally Normal Town story series, so we made one last episode: Forks in the Road!! Here's the trailer:

 

And here's the full video:

 There are a total of six episodes of Totally Normal Town, spanning seven years!! In three of the episodes, the town gets completely destroyed. Here's the playlist so you can watch the whole saga!! 

Time for Space College!!

 

Another beloved character from Totally Normal Town got an upgraded location: Leo Deblin!!

Leo Deblin is a hilarious character created by Roy Wood Jr. for the Daily Show. He's an entrepreneur with a brick-and-mortar barber school in a strip-mall that he's constantly using as a headquarters for new business ventures. At least it was a little storefront in a strip-mall (next to Little Ceasar's) back in 2022. 

 Now Leo Deblin's Space College has a state-of-the-art facility upstairs from his "Institute of Barbering". Complete with a flight simulator for the students to learn to pilot!

 

And there's even a rocket simulator with a cockpit -- currently in use by Leo Deblin himself:

 

In the ground floor of the same building, there's a bakery café:

 

The bakery includes a nice terrace in back where you can enjoy your pastries:

 

There's also convenient access to public transportation, and for fun I included a stained-glass window with a mermaid on it.

I couldn't have this building open up in the usual ways: Since the seilbahn tracks are attached to the roof, I couldn't have the roof come off, and it's not on the edge of the tectonic plates either. So instead I designed the façades of both the bakery and the barbering institute as separate pieces that can be taken off to reveal the interior.

In the "Institute of Barbering" I put up a poster that I constructing by piecing together two screenshots from Leo Deblin's commercials.

So Chewbacca can learn to cut hair and pilot a spacecraft in one place! 

Power and Construction

 I'm going to have to stop working on Totally Normal Town for a while (so I can work on some of my other projects), but there are still vacant lots waiting for more buildings to be built! What to do?

I use my old stand-by: construction sites!

 

As I've said, many of the buildings in this town are new designs for buildings from 2022, but the two cranes you see in Totally Normal Town go back farther in time than that!

 

I designed this crane build in back in 2011!! For a town I built on my coffee table in my previous apartment!

(It's remarkable how much better I've gotten at this since 2011 -- and yet there are a fair number of ideas from that city that I still use today.)

I also built a wind-farm to serve as the power-plant:

 

I'm not really thrilled with the design, though. I like the forest of brightly-colored wind turbines, but I think the grey framework is too bulky -- you can't really see the florescent battery cylinders as much as I would like.

 When I start building again (probably in 2026 or 2027) my plan is to un-build the power plant and redesign a better version of it on the back of the lot (where the construction site is currently). Then in the front lot (where the wind-farm is now) I'll build an improved version of the factory from the 2022 Totally Normal Town.