From footpath to brick
Every kind of road in one go: the paths feet wear into the grass, gravel, stone and brick, and ground drawn at the same size as everything else.
Roads in Groundwork start without anyone building them. Wherever people walk the same way day after day, their feet wear a path into the grass. A worn path is a little faster to walk on, and if nobody uses it any more, the grass comes back. In the showcase town I picked a straight line between the cabins and the fields, wore a path along it and set a handful of the oldest townsfolk walking up and down, since nobody gives the old ones a job.
Then the real roads. A gravel road is dragged out with the mouse, over the path or anywhere else, and costs one stone a tile. It goes down as a row of blueprints, and the builders lay it tile by tile. On gravel people walk 1.3 times as fast as on grass. Further on there is the stone road, two tiles wide and 1.6 times as fast, which comes later in the game, and the brick road, laid with bricks from the kiln, at 1.8 times.
The roads only look this good since the ground got redone. Next to the houses and machines it always looked like it came from another game: big blurry pixels under crisp little blocks. It is now drawn at the same size as everything else, thirty-two pixels a tile, so the grass has tufts and daisies, the paths have pebbles, and the roads have real cobbles and bricks.
