For the most part, yes. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a bad thing.
If it’s a huge map in the forest and the only surrounding people see is trees, then they’re going to be more prone to noticing key locations; for example, signs pointing to towns, the towns themselves and more. However, upon that area of importance I believe it should be showcased, and not surrounded with multiple things that barely set a difference between them and the rest of the environment.
One of the main reasons I was so drawn to the 2nd image is because everything is shown, it has so much more features visible compared to the 1st image and that open style is what most people tend to do when taking screenshots as to show off as many features of the map and how beautiful it can be, don’t get me wrong, the 1st image can definitely fit well into a game, but in a screenshot where you are asking for style preferences, I believe more can be shown off.
Good point, I was actually thinking that either I need to remove a lot of clutter (such as trees) so people could easily see the shop area, or make a building that stands out so people know to check it out because it’d seem somewhat important I guess.
Personally, I also like the 2nd style more. Unfortunately, the part count I’ve been told may lag for some platforms such as mobile and tablet (which is my main target audience). With the blocky style I was going for detail rather than simplicity, but the game is a minigame which is inherently meant to be simplistic. The blocky build is the first build I’ve done so I didn’t really consider how it’d run for different platforms haha.
I personally wouldn’t solely go off of the part count to measure how optimised a game will be. Parts > instances. If a game has more instances than it has parts, it’s more likely less optimised. Instances are assets such as UnionOperations and MeshParts, both are definitely more unoptimised than a few blocks. A higher part count should always be more welcome than a higher instance count especially because, after all, it’s Roblox. I don’t think they would have made their own assets unoptimised.
I’m personally not that good at that estimation, because at that point it would depend how much tris the instance has.
I just personally know that 5k parts is genuinely lower than you believe, I’ve personally made lobbies with around 15-30k parts that were still deemed optimised enough for certain phones. It also seems that you’re using ShadowMap as your lighting technology, which is genuinely pretty optimised, and with your overall use of SmoothPlastic, which is one of the most optimised materials, I think you’re fine.