Modular Game design

When planning how to approach this decision of making the starting village in such a short time, I had to look up into modular design.
I came across a blog by Joel Burgess in Gamasutra.com that covers the modular approach to Level Desing using open games like Skyrim and Fallout 3.
I pretty much invite people interested in game design to have a read at it and also to the article written back in November 2002 by Lee Perry (then Epic, now BitMonster) called 'Modular Level and Component Design' as pretty much it covers the whole process behind the time saving method of tilling props for the creation of a game environment.
Clearly the ideal way would be to make every single part unique to give a more realistic feeling to the world, but in a real working flow in the game industry, time constrains are always against game designers pushing us towards working in modular ways.
The creation of the props or kits of props comes easy to make once you understand the process of planning; the use of grids and scales becomes your best friend.
Before I even had the time of panicking of the amount of work I still had to do, even when using a repetition method I was glad they talked about the amount of team work that it's involve in the process and that usually this process is spread between the modellers  level designers and the art team; this only to spot any mistakes and make this props as reusable and efficient as possible, specially in open world games.

This is an examples of a kit used for a dungeon in Skyrim ready to  go to the 'Build-out' phase. 

For my own project the number of props is reduced to a slighly embarassing number as the time it would take me to texture them all would be more than what I already have, but at least I managed to get and experience of working under this modular concept. When I started working on the modular production of the houses I couldnt help to get this flashback of basic architectural planning that I learned years ago, and it turns out that once you understand the basic function and the way of avoiding it looking to 'square' the rest of the workflow seems to run a lot faster.

This is the type of concept I had originally for the style of the village. Looking messy, unsymmetrical and full of detail. With the time constrain, I was fearing of this being overly ambitious, and even though it was to an extend, I hope I managed to break down the key aspects of it and portrait them into my modular assets.