AutoTrafego City Generation

(reposted from the Off-by-One blog)

Hey, I'm Adam, artist for AutoTrafego.

Background

I'm a professional artist in Vancouver that's been doing video game art since 1999. My (somewhat dated) website is here. It's a long story that I may outline in a later post but after the game industry apocalypse last winter I ended up doing iPhone contracting and eventually hooked up with Dominique to do AT.

How it's Done

AT was originally supposed to be an isometric tile-based game (I've worked on several before on mobile platforms). The tile engine requirement was later dropped but things ended up so predictably aligned and easier to code that the iso 'look' was maintained. A huge selling point was to be as polished and professional as possible so a high level of quality was called for. Last year I had been working on some 3d city-building processes so I booted up Max and got to work adapting them to the environment.

Here's the initial result:

Automating the geometry creation is actually the easy part of the problem - the big issue that kills most city generators is the massive amount of texturing needed to look convincing close up. From a few thousand feet away you can get a pretty nice city (flight games take advantage of this, and with modern hardware can be pretty dense and stunning at a distance). But at close range it starts looking computery and there's no really effective way to deal with it yet. In fact city-based games like Grand Theft Auto are hand-built by art teams or cloned wholesale from real cities. My techniques are kind of a hybrid and worked quite well at AT's scale. I also had to enforce a certain block size to fit the isometric environment.


The next challenge was the streets and cars. Possibly someday we can move to a city design with curvy roads and the resulting traffic complications, but for now AT is straight lines and intersections. AT's vehicles are all 3d rendered, right down to the brake lights. Ridiculous overkill for the size the cars appear at in-game but is in keeping with the focus on quality (see a super pixely blowup of an SUV below).

Halfway through the project I wanted to move to rural areas for some variety so we moved away from city generation (only 3 of the 7 levels ended up as urban areas.) But overall we've been quite pleased with the results and we get a lot of compliments.