I wrote my bachelor thesis about the procedural generation of natural cities. The thesis was written for my bachelor degree of science in gamedesign 2019.

At the moment, the thesis is only available in german. The source code and an example programm built with the Unreal Engine 4 can be downloaded below.

About the project itself, it was developed to show that it is possible to create an algorithm for procedural generation with small teams in a short amount of time. The intention was to prove the theory might be of interest to indy companies as well.

Abstract

The creation of a game world is a big challenge in the production of new video games. Especially for game worlds with wide-ranging level limits and free exploration space, the creation turns out to be challenging and complex. In addition, a large amount of temporal resources, as well as appropriate personnel must be spent, so that the game worlds meet the requirements of the players. These factors are a big problem especially for smaller companies because their resources are much more limited.

Various procedural techniques have long been used for these challenges. This applies to the areas of texturing, special effects as well as for the generation of organic and natural objects. For the basics of creating a game world a variety of templates are taken. In most cases, maps and land register plans are used as a starting point. However, it is also possible to use two-dimensional vector fields (tensor fields) or randomly generated environments as a basis for the generation. Based on these fundamentals, for example, road courses and building forms are created through the different methods of city generation. The aim of this work is to develop an algorithm which creates cities with seemingly natural appearances based on procedural generation. There are already advanced programs that have optimized the generation process in terms of road growth.
Basically, there is a need in the video game market for a game world to be generated as easily as possible. Especially because the game worlds should be bigger, more complex and open.

Characteristics