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City Generator (watabou.github.io)
1211 points by breck on Feb 14, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 52 comments



Watabou has created many great projects. Besides the already mentioned Pixel Dungeon, check out these other generators:

- Neighborhood generator: https://watabou.itch.io/neighbourhood

- One Page Dungeon: https://watabou.itch.io/one-page-dungeon

- ProcGen Mansion: https://watabou.itch.io/procgen-mansion

- Village Generator: https://watabou.itch.io/village-generator

- Perilous Shores: https://watabou.itch.io/perilous-shores

- Castle Generator: https://watabou.itch.io/castle-in-the-mist

- Fantasy Manor: https://watabou.itch.io/fantasy-manor

- Rune Generator: https://watabou.itch.io/rune-generator

And there are many others in his profile.


If you like these you might also enjoy some of Lingdong Huang's generators.

This one is my personal favorite, some day when I have the time I want to hook it up to an e-ink display: https://shan-shui-inf.lingdong.works/


earlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23469233 with link to source code


These tools are great, and a little amusing sometimes. Description from a generated dungeon:

> Long after the Blind Lady's fall the den remained deserted. Currently it is overrun with eagles, which don't care about the history of the place. Rumors say that a legendary looking glass Torthos-Tyroth is hidden here.

Darn eagles.


Love these sort of things.

It’s been on HN a few time before but Townscaper by @OskaSta on twitter is also brilliant. He’s worth following as he documents the development of the projects he’s working on, currently a new island generator. Really interesting intersection of algorithms and art. Often shares other peoples work to thats super interesting, I have a feeling he may have retweeted something about this city generator but not sure if it’s the same one.

https://mobile.twitter.com/OskSta

https://www.townscapergame.com/

Edit:

Yes, it is the one Oskar has retweeted, this is the creator: https://mobile.twitter.com/watawatabou


I discovered Townscaper a couple weeks ago. It’s relaxing to play with and I have been enjoying building a reproduction of Mont-Saint-Michel...until yesterday when I ran into a limitation in the iPad version. :( According to Oskar’s reply, I can get either the height I need or the width I need, but not both. https://twitter.com/moreartyart/status/1493073923251994628?s...


I wonder if these limits actually do some client-side performance analysis, or if they just have all iOS devices hardcoded with those low limits. An iPad Pro is likely significantly faster than a whole lot of laptops used to play Townscaper.


Same author as this one[1] on Itch.io too, I think?

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17925666


Townscaper just got a wider release too from just being on PC for a long time, it's on iOS/Android and on Xbox Game Pass too. Wonderful fun.


Also been on Switch for a while.


If you like this, you need to check out Azgaar's Fantasy Map Generator: https://azgaar.github.io/Fantasy-Map-Generator/

It generates a complete, customizable fantasy map with towns and factions. It also integrates this city generator.


Big fan of Azgaar's - used it to build the world for my campaign. If anyone else who used it had issues a while back with an update (around 1.6) where biomes started showing over water, the solution is to clip water in the Styles tab for Biomes (per https://www.reddit.com/r/FantasyMapGenerator/comments/pygnkn... ).

Strong recommend, though takes some learning.



Huh. Wonderdraft seems similar to Inkarnate:

https://inkarnate.com/


You can zoom in! And edit! This is really cool.


Other cool generators from other creators also (in addition to those already posted, copied from [1]):

- Azgaar's Fantasy Map Generator: https://azgaar.github.io/Fantasy-Map-Generator/

- Oskar Stalberg's City Generator: https://www.oskarstalberg.com/game/CityGenerator/

- donjon's Fantasy World Generator: https://donjon.bin.sh/fantasy/world/

- Myth Weavers Dungeon Generator: https://www.myth-weavers.com/generate_dungeon.php

[1] https://www.fiction.tools/#worldbuilding-map-generators


This is beautiful! And must be even more beautiful from technology side.

I have recently became interested into procedural generation as my free time hobby. As a backend software engineer I was looking for a side project with no commitment. Which would be flexible to apply different types of technologies, boring and interesting at the same time. "The Forever Project" [1] article describes motivation behind it.

Since I had no experience with Rust, game development & procedural generated stuff, combining everything sounded pretty covering my "Forever Project" theme. I'm currently going through Rust Rougelike tutorial[2] to get basic understanding how games are being developed & maps are generated. I like the tutorial a lot because it covers so much different topics. From game dev, few libraries, to different approaches of maps generators.

There is a lot of content there but I'm already raising questions to myself where to look next? What should I learn & focus so I could deepen my knowledge in procedural generated content? I understand I always can read random tutorials (what I'm doing) and try to glue something from them. But maybe you have advises or more guided content as books, long tutorials, courses?

Thanks.

[1] https://heredragonsabound.blogspot.com/2020/02/the-forever-p...

[2] https://bfnightly.bracketproductions.com/rustbook/chapter_0....


That rust tutorial looks like a good place to start. RogueBasin has a good set of articles covering different aspects of roguelike building, including procedural generation: http://roguebasin.com/index.php/Articles

There's also this port of "the complete roguelike tutorial" from python to rust: https://github.com/tomassedovic/roguelike-tutorial


Here's a pointer: once you have entered "warp" mode from the context menu, options in the "Menu" menu change and you can choose in which way you want to modify the map.


Also scroll on the mousewheel to increase/decrease the radius of points to warp.

And also check out the Style menu! I like some of the alternative colour schemes.

The level of detail in this is impressive.


Yeah...everything is accessed from the MENU button

Refreshing the page does not generate a new map


This tool generates most of my cities for my tabletop games (OSE [B/X]). He has a fully integrated system that can take you from territory to town level. It's really impressive stuff.

Also saves refs like myself hours of (very poorly done) sketching.

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/watawatabou


Check the sidebar on /r/proceduralgeneration if you want to see some great projects like this! We used to have a monthly contest and some of the entries were extremely impressive!


One of my all time favorite fantasy map generator: https://rawgit.com/wlievens/scallywag/master/index.html

(source is here: https://github.com/wlievens/scallywag)


It's been a while since I've seen this name! They also authored a roguelike titled pixel dungeon [1] which I've sunk countless hours into when I was in high school. I suppose city generation not too dissimilar to dungeon generation

[1]: https://watabou.itch.io/pixel-dungeon


Which also gave rise to a million remixes / embellished versions, Shattered Pixel Dungeon[1] remains my fave roguelike on mobile!

1: https://shatteredpixel.com/shatteredpd/


"watabou" is already famous for Pixel Dungeon, one of the best Rogue-like games for mobile. It's inspired many forks as well.

This project looks to be on the way to another interesting contribution to OSS.


Obligatory link to Pixel Dungeon: http://pixeldungeon.watabou.ru/


Another developer of interesting generators in this vein is Martin O'Leary (twitter.com/mewo2).

Metropologeny: https://twitter.com/metropologeny Uncharted Atlas: https://twitter.com/unchartedatlas

https://mewo2.com


Here's another couple such generators, though they create star systems and planets, and not medieval maps:

https://ironarachne.com/#/starsystem

https://ironarachne.com/#/planet


This is really cool, but the mobile UX is confusing. There’s no UI, just the generated map. I tried reloading for a new city but that doesn’t work because the URL is updated to include the generation parameters (which is not obvious on mobile).

Using iOS 15 mobile Safari on iPhone Mini 12

EDIT: now seeing a menu button that wasn’t there before, that helps


You may need to tap for the UI to show.


Cool project. The cities feel very old-world, it would be neat to have more modern grid-style layouts too.


I’ve been using this for years for the 5e game I run. It’s surreal seeing it here but it’s a great tool


this is amazing. does anyone know how one would get started building something like this?


For anyone looking for more depth for their TTRPG games I highly suggest exploring https://eigengrausgenerator.com/. It will lazily generate beautiful, varied details on a town, it's locations, it's buildings, it's denizens, their relations, provide story hooks, and more. Like a good game master it gives just enough surface detail to maintain the immersion, but will generate more detail as you (or your players) interact with whatever catches your (their) fancy.


Pretty cool. I had a city with an open square in the middle, and tried to generate another square somwhere else, but it didn't work. I only managed to move the streets.


These are really good. I've seen several of these sort of city generators, but I like this one better than most. I'm not sure why exactly, but I immediately want to use these in an RPG. There are professional hand-made fantasy cities that aren't as good as these.


This got me jones'n for SimCity...


This is so good. My town of Cheesewall will never be marauded.


My mouse army is marching there as we speak


I was delighted when a section of my town was named "Fairy Ferry".


Thank You. There's 30 mins. in the Watabou's "generator" blackhole


This tool is super impressive. Medieval book editors will go crazy with it!!


My favourite part is that it is not called "thiscitydoesnotexist".


I've used these a few times in my D&D games. They're great!


How does one get started on the technology and algorithms for this?


Wow this is really neat. I could spend hours with this.


Are any of these generators open source?


Now I want a medevial Plauge Inc game


this thing does a better job than all of the new developments here


This is lovely




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