it will be difficult to estimate material resources as I was using scrap foam and wood was left over from some job .I was on a pretty tight budget for this project so I was scrounging for most of the materials. I use a brother printer and a re-inking station so my ink costs were about $30 I purchased photo paper from the dollar store eight sheets for a dollar. I glue the photo paper with rubber cement to mat board ( on sale at Hobby lobby) thus the mat board gets doubled when you glue the inside and outside walls to make a nice firm wall that doesn't warp. The best find was at a railroad supply store the white picket fence that is used as second-floor railing at the saloon, iron fencing at the graveyard and wooden railing at the courthouse and lastly the iron trim at the undertaker's house I was able to do all these pieces for a $1.89/
As far as time I spent a few weekends laying out the design to scale on a old sign. I had to make a few cardboard buildings to make sure that the buildings could be seen by all the players around the table interior sets and that the pieces could be moved in and out of the streets.I use a model builder program to get the scaling right and then transfer that template over to Microsoft publisher where I build most of the actual buildings. I have previously ripped all the files from WWG and separated the elements so that I have a folder of just walls, doors, windows, trim, etc., then I just drop and drag the elements into a building I have already saved templates of buildings in Microsoft publisher so putting together a building can be done pretty quickly. As you can see the same wood wall is in several different colors that I did in Photoshop. I would usually make one building an evening as a break from my work. although right before I was going to play the first game I was working fast and furious for probably eight hours each night for about four days to get it to a playable level, probably still have about 20 hours worth of work to get it Completely finished.
One trick I have learned in model building is to always move forward, when you make a mistake figure out how to incorporate that mistake into the build. Several of my buildings I did not had not laid out right but instead of redoing them I just added wood trim which gave it a more 3-D look. I always save the small finishing accessories to cover up mistakes, for example in the end I started using a hot glue gun to hurry things along (not recommended) so I had to cover up a lot of glue spots with things that would hide them.
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I got my Western build to the point that you can play game on it still have hours of work to make a box cover and go back and finish out the pieces that I slapped together hurriedly the night before the game. but the new game mechanics that I developed worked brilliantly and the six players enjoyed it thoroughly.
