AdviceToolbox
Simulating seasons, holidays, days, nights, and festivals
are a simple way to bring game cities to lifeCycles and seasons
in video game cities
All cities change throughout the year. Regular
parades during important anniversaries were a
major spectacle throughout the 19th and most
of the 20th century, from Paris on Bastille Day
to Venice’s annual carnival. Of course, events
like these are rarely the same each year; they
can be directly influenced by the weather or the
impact of a major event. If a war has recently
taken place in your game, for example, the great
carnival in your capital could be replaced by a
day of mourning and remembrance.
Simpler examples of cyclical events in a game
city include shops closing their doors every
night, just as pubs and bars open for business;
a character standing outside her office every
afternoon for her daily smoke before she heads
back home; or the paperboy announcing the
latest news each morning. Actually, there’s
an almost infinite number of ways to infuse
your game spaces with a sense of time, from
annual Christmas or Easter decorations to
having characters converge on the local church
every Sunday.
It’s important to make sure your changes are
obvious and easy to notice; if they’re intendedAUTHOR
KONSTANTINOS DIMOPOULOS
Konstantinos Dimopoulos is a game urbanist and designer, combining a PhD
in urban planning with video games. He is the author of the forthcoming Virtual
Cities atlas, designs game cities, and consults on their creation. game-cities.comisiting your favourite in-game shop
to find the keeper has gone fishing.
Unexpectedly running into a
festival in a medieval village square.
Frantically looking for shelter
every single time those cursed sirens sound.
These are just some of the thrills a dynamic
urban environment can offer. By contrast,
an invariable, frozen city where nothing ever
changes – where summer and winter look and
feel exactly the same – can feel strange, or
worse, plain dull.
Among the countless types of change that can
take place in a city – from the great to the small,
and the personal to the societal – seasonal
and cyclical changes are the easiest to imagine
and model in a game. Admittedly, creating the
assets needed to simulate the passage of time
can be both expensive and time-consuming.
We therefore have to make sure that any
differentiations are as noticeable, and as
easy to implement, as possible. It’s also worth
pointing out that cyclical changes can be reused
throughout a game, and are thus relatively
economical to create – especially if they can be
produced via lighting or environmental effects
and simple triggers.
Such changes can cover all sorts of
overlapping temporal scales: day and night,
weekdays and weekends, seasonal cycles like
harvests, Christmas and New Year’s Eve, and
even larger scales like, say, the Olympic Games,
which only occur every four years.
Cyclical and seasonal change is evident in all
cities as they celebrate holidays, go to work in
the morning, and welcome tourists each spring.30 / wfmag.cc
V
CYCLES
AND EVENTS
Creating overlapping schedules
with daily, weekly, monthly, and
seasonal events can lead to
vibrant civic lives, even if each
of these cycles only includes
one or two recurring events.
Imagine shops that close at
night as street traffic dies, a
market every Saturday, and
a dance every other Sunday,
in a town where people dress
differently depending on the
season, and a supply ship visits
once per month. The interplay
of these individually simple
events would make your world
feel more complicated than it
really is. ^ Seasonal or occasional rain offers a fine opportunity to showcase umbrella
fashion, as Blade Runner did so brilliantly.