I have of late been really interested in the designing of strange cities. I have been trying to create a fish tank type experience where the computer procedurally generates along a set line of rules a working city (with room for variation) for the player to watch and to a limited degree interact with.

I have been playing around with a couple of ideas for making an interesting (and by no means normal) city. I have settled on an idea for a side-on civilisation based on stacks of towers. Each tower would be named and designed to include the following things listed below (I will include a chart). The hope will be to create a city that isn't based around roads or geographical restraints.

Each tower has lifts (something I don't think I want the player to see or have any real interaction with but that is still to be decided) but apart from the obvious restraints of the lift, interaction between the different towers takes the form of walkways (big and seldom used) and anti-gravity vehicles are used for transportation and other things. This coupled with the connection of cables, gas vents, drainage pipes, flowers and lovely white birds (and their crap) should make for a nicely detailed and beautiful city.

I think also the city should be constantly changing on variables that affect things like economy, happiness, etc. But will probably end up getting on to such complex things a bit later on.


I have wrote this here, to one ask people what they think of the idea (if you can picture it on my limited information)? And secondly using the supplied list of buildings (I want to limit the buildings (art/programming) needed without limiting the realism* or variation)

* - I use the term very loosely.




If I have, and probably have, left out any information you really needed to know please don't hesitate to ask. I want to make this as interesting for everybody to see as I see it in my head.

Obviously you could keep on elaborating as for the time being, your idea is not quite clear to me.
I think you could try to take a look at "Scrapland", a game you play as a robot in a robot world. The game itself is so-so, but the city is pretty convincing to me.

You might want to have a talk with a real architect, city design is typically included in the studies, so asking your non-programming friends could help.
In particular, note that even if no ground roads are present, it is very likely cities will, over time, always evolve around their "flows" of people. If you want to be convincing, I think you should start from understood scenarios and then go exotic.

Also, next time please do your graph bottom-up instead of left-right so it fits the window.