kerbal-creator-discovered-an-ingenious-strategy-to-redesign-his-new-flight-sim’s-map:-import-it-from-cities:-skylines

Inform me an RPG developer used a tabletop roleplaying system to sketch out the design for his or her new videogame? I sleep. Inform me the creator of Kerbal Area Program used one other sim—the preferred metropolis builder of the previous decade—to create the map for his mannequin aircraft flight simulation? Actual shit. I am unable to consider a extra PC gaming answer to indie game improvement.

I not too long ago chatted with Felipe “HarvesteR” Falanghe about Kitbash Mannequin Membership, a relaunched model of a game he first launched in early entry in 2021. On the time it was referred to as Balsa Mannequin Flight Simulator, however Falanghe defined the brand new title, new writer, and new scope (examine all that right here). 

Then we began speaking concerning the map. Kitbash Mannequin Membership is ready in a bay with a pair of islands on the heart. It was initially sparsely detailed, as a result of Balsa began as a VR dogfighting game. Now that house wanted to be explorable on foot and from the angle of small mannequin autos, it wanted to be far more intricate. It is also 9 occasions larger than earlier than. How’d they pull that off regardless of being a tiny three-person indie workforce?

“We actually needed to rethink our complete method to the map design and the way we had been placing it collectively,” Falanghe mentioned. “We really ended up redoing all of our instruments to generate the world, to some extent where we may import vector knowledge from OpenStreetMap. We actually wished our map to be the identical fictional bay location, so we used a metropolis builder game with a mod that would export OpenStreetMap knowledge. It exported the structure, no property or something, simply the structure as vectors. So we acquired to construct out a mannequin of our world and plan out where issues go, then we had vector knowledge to generate the world in a semi-procedural means.”

After I requested, Falanghe confirmed that the game was Cities: Skylines. Seems we even wrote about simply such a Skylines map means again in 2015.

“We used it, primarily, as a really user-friendly stage editor. If you concentrate on how SimCity got here to be, it was initially a stage modifying instrument that Will Wright got here up with to create the world for a helicopter game. So there may be a whole lot of overlap, traditionally, between metropolis constructing video games and stage editors. They sort of share a typical ancestor.” 

That game, by the way in which, was not SimCopter, however Raid on Bungeling Bay.