SimCity 4

I art directed SimCity 4. Here's a few screencaptures I took while developing it. These date from back in 2002, which is approximately 3 thousands years ago in computer terms, but I'm still pretty happy with them. I think that they hold up.


This is a the first time that we got the terrain looking good. We made a system that simulated erosion, and that colored the different parts of the terrain depending on whether they were exposed or sheltered, high or low, windward or leeward of water. It was pretty elaborate!

We had a little simulator that would push clouds about, and get them to pile up on the windward side of mountains ( I grew up in Maui, every afternoon the clouds would pile up on the side of Haleakala and everything outside our house up in Kula would go cool and grey).



I really worked to get the terrain to integrate nicely with roads and buildings. I wanted it to feel like one seamless place, not stitched together from lots of different parts.


For night lighting we layered a cool blue tint over the whole scene, then added back in warm colored masks for the windows. It was a giant compositing engine.




I'm particularly proud of the roads and networks. They're composed of hundreds of different tiles that could combine in thousands of ways (intersections of all sorts, and connections between roads and highways, roads and rail, etc.).

And we had to figure out how to conform the terrain to them, adding bridges, leveling, making retaining walls, and the like. And it had to be seamless, so that the player would just draw out what they wanted and the system would figure out what to do automatically.

Designing them was like taking a 6 month long IQ test. These are a few design prototypes that helped me to think through some of the problems.




 





Here's a pretty crazy terrain where the roads snake and switchback up, and then connect with bridges. This shot shows the first time that it all came together.