Cityographer: A Random City Generator & Mapping Tool Kickstarter Begins

[InkwellIdeas]

Here’s the description from the Kickstarter page:

Random city generator and editor for role-playing games of multiple genres & systems. Runs on Windows, Mac OSX and Linux.
More than just map software!

Do your players ever take a game session in a different direction and you need a quick city or village? Or maybe you want to cut down on your game’s prep time by getting some help creating some of the cities or villages in your game’s setting?

Cityographer is the perfect solution for these situations! You set some preferences for the city you want (technology level, population size, whether the city has a river, if it is on the coast, etc.) on a setup screen and it will randomly generate an entire village or city for you. (You can also start with a blank map/city.)

Not only will the program generate the city’s map, but it will generate simple floorplans of the buildings, and each building’s residents and any important belongings. If the building is a business you’ll also get a list of the staff and a menu or price list of products available.

Further, everything and anything can be fully or individually re-generated or hand edited! So if you don’t like the whole city, just start over. But if you simply don’t like the placement of a few buildings, move them or delete them and add new ones. If you don’t like a particular building just regenerate it or an aspect of it. For example if the building is an inn, regenerate it or regenerate just the staff or just the price list or hand edit any particular item!

Note: Although the backer rewards list a delivery timeframe of October, we hope to have a beta available in September and perhaps earlier.
Take the city with you

Like sister-products Hexographer and Dungeonographer, Cityographer will be written in Java and can easily be run from a laptop running Windows, Mac OSX or Linux. But Cityographer will also let you export your city/village to a set of webpages which you can ZIP and transfer to another computer or post to a website to view via a hand-held device. An RTF export will also be available. There will likely also be a PDF export which will make your city into a PDF document for viewing on anything with a PDF viewer. Maybe an MS Word export too.

More details and screenshots from the prototype are on the project’s Kickstarter page.

(BTW, if you have an idea for a cool high-level backer reward, please let me know. I’d love to entertain ideas.)

 

[pming]

Hiya

Sounds interesting, and quite useful. I own both Dungeonographer and Hexographer, and this looks like it will likely get added to the collection.

One suggestion though. For your "NPC Descriptions"...make them more generic. Don't state: "Half-Elf Bard, Lawful-Neutral, 2 100gp gems...etc.". That's assuming too much. Make it more generic, like "Half-Elf entertainer, law-abiding, has 2 mid-value gemstones...etc." That way, if I'm running, say, Powers & Perils, I can just stat him as a "Human with Entertainer-Singer & Stringed Instrument, Law orientation, with 2 opals of 5 SC each"...or if I'm running Star Frontiers, "Human musician, law abiding, has two gemstones worth 1,000cr each"...etc...etc...

Basically, use "common language" to describe items and wealth. That frees the game master from trying to do mental gymnastics in converting X to Y using some mathmatical formula or other form of equasion. A "rich" character in the Pathfinder RPG can have 1,000gp, or 100,000gp...depending on the campaign, and being "rich" in a game like Marvel Super Heroes Advanced doesn't equate to numbers, it is a rank rating like "Excellent Resources", or "Amazing Resources" (re: not a set $ value).

^_^

Paul L. Ming

 

[InkwellIdeas]

Thanks for the question!

Yep, we'll have a set of config files where each tech level you choose for the city will point to a different config file. (So a weapons shop in a medieval city will have different weapons from a modern shop or SF shop.) And, you'll be able to point to specific versions of those config files for specific games. (Yes, the screenshots assume a D&D configuration.) Once we get into beta testing we'll release/post the built-i n config files and you and other members of the community could customize and share them for specific games.

I'll add this to the project's FAQ shortly.

 

[GhostBear]

I am interested in this product, and will be heading over to support it after I post here.

I own Campaign Cartographer / City Designer, but to be quite honest it's rather difficult to use well (on top of being buggy) and sometimes I just want something quick. This will fit my needs nicely.

Out of curiosity, will it be possible to modify the algorithms that decide where roads / buildings / rivers / etc. go?

 

[Living Legend]

higher level backer award ideas:

let a person design their own custom building, like a castle, arena or temple, that could maybe be chosen as a special kind of building to add in. Let them name it as well maybe. I haven't used these products before but I'm assuming such a thing wouldn't be very difficult. I'm thinking Sim City when you can get a stadium or mayors house, that kind of thing.

Or maybe they can design their own custom city, with special designer touches, and those can be available for download on your website.

something to get the fans involved and show new customers what the program can do.

 

[InkwellIdeas]

Out of curiosity, will it be possible to modify the algorithms that decide where roads / buildings / rivers / etc. go?

I'm a little torn on the approach which feeds into this. I'm leaning to having a large number of city/village templates that have the roads designated as main thoroughfares vs. sidestreets. When the generator runs, it picks a template and randomly picks which sidestreets to use (somewhat based on population.) The city walls, rivers, and harbors/coasts (if any) would be added/placed randomly and would impact the city's design to further give a random look. The buildings in the template would be used to place buildings in the final city of a similar, but not the same type. (Subject to also some randomness to determine if that spot has a building at all, which is also subject to population.) So if the template has 300 houses, maybe for a town 200 are used. And if you run it again for the same population, 200 different ones are used (as well as some different sidestreets). For businesses, maybe you have 25 shops, blacksmiths, etc. on the template. In the final city, what was a shop on the template may be a blacksmith. Or maybe you have 5 possible temple or theatre spots. In the final city, maybe 3 spots actually have temples/theatres and they may have different shapes/looks than what was in the template. Also the template might get rotated to further make the cities look different.

So in this scenario, you'd be able to make your own templates to customize things and pick a specific one when creating the map.

On the other hand, I could go completely dynamic/random (I've got a basic version of one at Random City Map Generator v2 (warning:jsp page with an applet)) so I could improve that algorithm. Yes, you would be able to set a number of properties that feed into the algorithm (more than just the few that are in that generator.)

But I think that the randomized templates approach makes more sense. Too often the completely random approach creates cities that have bad layouts.

higher level backer award ideas:

let a person design their own custom building, like a castle, arena or temple, that could maybe be chosen as a special kind of building to add in. Let them name it as well maybe. I haven't used these products before but I'm assuming such a thing wouldn't be very difficult. I'm thinking Sim City when you can get a stadium or mayors house, that kind of thing.

I could see having a reward where for a $200-$500 will let you spec out one of the icon sets. So if you really want a steampunk map items icon pack, you can get us to do it. You can also give a bullet point description for what each icon should be. (Steampunk is an icon pack we'll probably only do if we add a reward like this of if we are going for our 6th stretch goal or something like that .)

 

[InkwellIdeas]

Y'know how I said up above about essentially preferring randomizing a large number of templates over a random generation algorithm? In the immortal words of Chris Knight (Val Kilmer) in Real Genius, "Strike that, reverse it."

It looks like I can get good results with the random generation algorithm after all. I foresee a few algorithms that generate different types of city layouts (hub-and spoke, planned square-ish blocks, etc.) You can pick a particular type and the generator will do it, or you can set that to random.