Designing a (virtual) City.

Tonight I start designing the city for my new game. For now I'm calling it New Kowloon. Though, that will likely change.

There are some constraints.

It's a noir cyberpunk dystopia in an alternate near future. Think Blade Runner, and you'll probably have a pretty decent idea. Of course I don't want it to be too close to Blade Runner, but between the original film and 2049, it's going to be hard to not come close.

Below is a render of the look I've achieved so far. If you've been following me, you might recognize it as a shot from my entry to the Unity Neon Challenge. As you can see, it's already pretty similar to the original Blade Runner film, but as time goes on and I manage to flesh things out, it will take on it's own personality.

One of the technical constrains I'm faced with is that the streets need to be in a grid pattern so that areas connect properly. Not a huge deal, maybe its a planned city. I can move things around after the fact, they blocks just need to be generated on a grid.

As you will be able to freely fly a car around the entire city, I'll need to plan how I deal with these streets as well. I can't have thousands of pedestrians walking all over the place(again for technical reasons). And the player will not be able to land wherever they see fit.

This is where I take some inspiration from Kowloon walled city. The former ungoverned densely packed settlement in Hong Kong

In this way I can eliminate most streets, though of course many large through-ways will have to remain, I think that I can cover most of the streets with haphazard infrastructural additions like pipes, cables and catwalks that would prevent anything flying from getting to street level (save some designated landing areas).

This may actually make for a really interesting look from the sky. With light bleeding through the tangled mess below, inciting the player to wonder what lies beneath.

From street level, it makes looking up more interesting as well. Having dripping pipes and sparking wires dangling overhead, only catching glimpses of the sky beyond and feeling the scale of the buildings around you. I've already done this with my last game to pretty good effect. Have a look at the second shot in the trailer to see what I mean:

A bigger challenge that I face is they layout itself. I want to have distinguishable areas. A downtown business district, Chinatown, slums, etc., but I don't even know where to start with this. I may start a list of areas that I want, then just go in and start playing around.

I know it's probably not the right way to do things. A large company would hire a concept artist to work with a city planner or something, then work to make the city reflect that art. Sounds expensive... I find that working freeform like this is actually helpful (as well as cheap). Sometimes I'll start building something, and that something turns into something unexpected. Something better than I had planned. While building areas in Technolust, entire pieces of the plot changed in this way.

Ok. I'm going to get to it. This helped. Thanks for listening :)

To read more of my developmental brain farts, follow me here @anticleric.