Create cities games

City life isn't always a walk in the park unless you're actually walking through a park, that is. It's noisy, crowded, and commutes can be frustrating. If only there was a way to design the perfect city to end all your urban woes Luckily, game designers feel your pain and for years they have provided us with an outlet to play God and construct our very own utopias.

Why brave the real streets when you can just build your own to go anywhere your heart desires? We've constructed our very own list of the Best City Building Games of All Time so that you can find the ideal way to create a world of your very own. Updated December 17, by Ryan Bamsey: The city builder genre is an ever-changing, ever-developing one with a bevy of titles to choose from. Whether you're after grand megacities or neat village management, there's definitely something for you.

We've taken another look at this list and added a few more of our favorites. Cities XL deserves a spot on this list alone for how ambitious it was back in the time it was released. On the surface, it appeared to be a simple city-building game but it had an online multiplayer component which was interesting, to say the least.

Cities XL also allowed players to interact with one another in a persistent planet. Each city belongs to a player and each player can even trade with others, basically running a simulated world. Sadly this online service was closed several months later and Cities XL became just a single-player game instead of an MMO based around city-building.

Even so, it was a big deal back in its time and was one of the best city-building games back then before SimCity and Cities: Skylines improved on the 3D city-builder formula.

While Townscaper isn't a city builder in the traditional sense, there is no doubt that the whole purpose of this game is to build a settlement. You have many options for colors and styles, and it's a very calming experience overall. Townscaper has come into its own as a tool for those who wish to use their manufactured towns as set pieces in their tabletop games. It lets you make a town exactly as you need it in exactly the configurations you need.

The SimCity franchise has been around a long time. The first entry in the series dates back almost 30 years. It is essentially the grandfather of all city-building games and paved the way no pun intended for many games to come.

These titles are still relevant in the gaming sphere, extending from PC and consoles to find a new home on mobile devices. It may not be the most innovative title on this list, but the formula they created is still solid today and definitely worth your time. You can even check out the final entry in the series, SimCity: Buildit , for free on your favorite mobile device.

Medieval Dynasty is an odd one where rather than being some omniscient figure dictating where buildings are built and what your residents do, you are instead just some guy who dictates where buildings are built and what your residents do.

The settlement building features of this game are incredibly fun to interact with and they turn the game from a simple survival game with a generations system into something far grander. While this title is currently in Early Access, Foundation is a very promising medieval-era city builder from Polymorph Games who proudly advertise their game's lack of a grid and focus on the procedural nature of settlement building.

The game is very good at emulating what it must have felt like to manage a medieval settlement, with many events being out of your hands and the enforcement of a reactive rather than proactive gameplay style.

In addition to that, the game has a thriving modding community sure to extend the title's lifespan many years. If your greatest goal in life is to gain favor with a Nordic God and earn your place in Valhalla, have we got a game for you! Valhalla Hills is a throwback to the popular Settlers games in which players will build settlements in an attempt to earn favor with Odin. If you're looking for a more laid-back city-building experience, this is one we highly recommend.

The colorful, cartoonish art style is appealing and there is less of a focus on combat than some of our other titles.

You will need to fight for resources with the local Dwarven population and there are some monsters to contend with, but for the most part, you can focus on expanding your Nordic empire. Urban Empire is a city-building sim that takes a slightly different approach. Restore Generator. Run Generator. Support This Generator.

I'd love to see what you make, send it to me on Twitter! You can turn them on when you want them with the 'buildingModels' option under 'Style' Advanced Usage: Tensor Field Cities are generated using tensor field.

Maps Open the 'Maps' folder to start creating roads. Water - generate until you find a sea and river combination you like. Under the params folders, you can change the noise parameters to control how rough the shore and river bank are. The simplify tolerance controls how closely the road follows the waterline. Roads - There are three road sizes: main, major, minor.

Under each of the folders, you can click generate to create each class of roads individually. You can go back and edit the tensor field at any point in this process to create roads on different tensor fields. Buildings - click 'addBuildings' to fill the city with buildings. If you can't see them, the chosen style might not display buildings, or you might not be zoomed in enough.

The 'Default' style, and 'GoogleNoZoom' styles both show buildings at all zoom levels. You can change the minimum building size, and the sidewalk size with 'shrinkSpacing' Animation - Generation will be faster if you untick 'Animate', but note that this will swamp the UI thread so you won't be able to pan, zoom, or retry until generation has completed.

Animation speed gives you a tradeoff between FPS and generation time. Tensor Field Detail - Opening the Tensor folder reveals the tensor field. I addRadial a couple of times to add some roundabouts. I addGrid a few times and change their size, decay, and position to vary the grid structure. More information. May 05, May 01, Apr 26, Apr 25, Apr 24, Apr 23, How many inhabitants would a place require to feel right?

Are there slums and wealthy districts? How about rivers and hills? Does the place need a functioning economy? How can we show city life and project a strong and memorable urban image?

Those are the exact kinds of urban questions I can answer for you according to your project's needs, and then go on and create your city's plans, simulation models, detailed descriptions of everyday life, or even the GIS mapping of your interactive regions, settlements, and urban centers.

What's more, I can help you avoid all the immersion-breaking urban aspects designers of game cities, and level designers usually get wrong or do poorly. Spotting and fixing all too common problems is an important part of my urban consulting work; problems such as a town not making sense on any real map, a supposed metropolis with a population of a mere people, a central avenue feeling too short and empty, glaring omissions, atmosphere-damaging anachronisms, or even drop-in bars located in the middle of the urban wasteland.

Of course, troubleshooting is not enough to carry your project all the way towards the creation of a living, breathing, unique, and thus believable and exciting game city. A successful city, you see, has to feel real, and in order to feel real its complexities and major characteristics have to be understood.

And analysed. And then toyed with. Dark alleys sporting deadly urban fauna must feel plausible, as even high-fantasy worlds need consistency. An urban fantasy environment that feels concrete will make the game it is supporting feel believable itself.

There are countless details that can make places breathe, and instantly help a city come to life, though realizing that cities are much more than the sum of their roads and buildings is crucial when it comes to crafting them.

Cities are their societies, functions, people, systems, climates, colours, styles, shops, topographies, sounds, smells, public art, and an amazing variety of other things -- all these, I can help you discover, create, distill, and use. My help on such matters of the city involves everything from the application of urban planning on level design -- and many sketches -- to districts modeled with Lego bricks and quite a bit of world building. It's crucial to keep the urban layer as something integral to the rest of the creative process.

My work aims to further inspire game, level, and narrative designers also developers and artists , and provide them with new ideas, mechanics, solutions, and tools. To offer a way towards building the illusion of a real place rather than that of a film-set. Urban consulting work for Frogwares' H.