The Sinking City – Istanbul 8 hour challenge tech showcase EMBARGO
Ask any open-world game developer and they’ll tell you creating a digital city is a massive undertaking, often manually pacing assets, street by street. To help streamline the creation of Oakmont, the fictive 1920’s flooded metropolis in The Sinking City, Frogwares created their own city builder tool in Unreal Engine 4.
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 Istanbul, the winning city, the team got to work trying the speed and layout accuracy of the tool.
After the release of The Sinking City, the team plans to give the tool away for free to use.
You can watch the video below.
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