Ask any open-world game dev and they’ll tell you that creating a digital city is a massive undertaking, often manually placing assets street by street. To help streamline the creation of Oakmont, the fictional 1920’s flooded metropolis in The Sinking City, Frogwares created their own city builder tool in Unreal Engine 4… and today they are showing off the tech in a new video.
One of the brains behind the tool, Katerina Frolova, is a trained architect and level designer. Her design allows users to set a few urban planning variables inside the tool and then city districts can be generated at the click of a button. Something that normally takes weeks, can now be done in hours.
For an internal test of the tech, Frogwares asked fans on social media to vote from a list of iconic cities. The team would then see how big a district they could recreate within just 8 hours / 1 working day. Armed with buildings created earlier for The Sinking City and a Google Maps overlay of the winning city, Istanbul, the team got to work trying the speed and layout accuracy of the tool.
“Hopefully once The Sinking City comes out, we can release the tech for free so other devs, educational institutions or even hobbyists can use it. The tool has been invaluable to our game’s development so I can only imagine what others could potentially create with it.” – Wael Amr, Frogwares CEO
About The Sinking City:
The Sinking City is an open world, open investigation game set in a Lovecraft universe. The player steps into the shoes of a private investigator who finds himself trapped in the city of Oakmont Massachusetts – a place suffering from unprecedented floods of supernatural origins. The player must uncover the source of whatever has taken possession of the city, and the minds of its inhabitants.
The Sinking City is hitting Xbox One, PS4 and PC come 21st March 2019.
