really very good! a collaborative activity with a friendly dash of competition.
i do have the following suggestions:
1] less arbitrary street "ingredients"
street building should feel like building, not cooking. more chopping and hauling planks, mining dullite, and digging would help change the feeling of street building from being too much like the recipe cooking quests.
that said, if a non arbitrary use for an interesting component can be established, not everything has to be "industrial". someone suggested that maybe the nature of street could be reflected in the "spice" [of life] used to make the street .. like old[er] spice could lead to an old, respectable neighbourhood.
i think that's a great idea. the components just have to make sense, and not feel like a random assemblage of items obviously selected for game balance purposes.
2] progress should feel like you're actually building something
instead of just a generic progress bar, use the street's mini-map. as the street is built, the mini-map slowly reveals the level. the unfinished part of of the level could be white, black or a landscape of undeveloped land.
again, this would differentiate building from all the other processes in the game that use progress bars.
also, if using the hoe animation could look more like grading earth, or other animations for building are a bit more specific to street creation, that would also help the overall feel.
3] materials staging first, construction last
this one i'm less sure about, but it sprang to mind but i will share it.
so there are really two kinds of contribution to street creation. one is material components and the other is labour. it feels weird to contribute material components after all the labour has been completed, because normally labour is required to use material components. from a gaming standpoint this is also out of whack given the current balance.
this is because the labour is easier to contribute than material components, faster, and grants a higher contribution percentage. so what can happen, and happened today, is someone swoops in, quickly does ALL the labour, generates 30% contribution, and then kicks back and waits for the material gatherers to do the difficult, time consuming work.
if the labour had to wait on the material components, then the material gatherers could get first crack at the labour as a reward.
also, this could allow for an even better "feel" of construction. there could first be a graphic of all the street building components being staged, illustrations of steadily growing piles of planks and minerals. then, when all the materials are staged, have the progress animation of the street being built/revealed [as above] - with the staged material piles slowly depleting.
not sure that last idea is worth the development time, but something to consider.