Hey cyberpunk builders! The art overhaul is proceeding in new, exciting directions that I wanted to share with you. If you missed my last update where I explained what the art overhaul is, check it out here. I'm now halfway done with re-working all of the textures of the game based on the new color palette. This new art direction is inspiring me, so I have decided that the art overhaul will include also new stuff, in particular: new countries and new cars!
New countries upcoming
Right now, you can start your city in 4 different zones of the 2093 world: The Greenland Autonomous Zone, the Canada Trade Authority, the Federal Trade Authority, the Island of California, and the Low Lands of Great Florida. With the next update, I'm planning to add 18 new territories. Yes, you read that right - 18!
The next update will complete the Americas and will also include all of the territories belonging to Europe. For every new country, I go through a creative, technical, and lore process. First, the definition: I created the list of all of the territories in the Skid Cities world back with the first release of the game. The world looks very different in 2093, due to a variety of events that happened in the 40' and 50' that reshaped the world.
Eventually, I plan to make every single territory available for the players to build into. Each territory will have different characteristics, has different organizations that are present, and may have a unique look to it.
When I create a new territory, I establish the lore around it, and then based on that I create the territory's coat of arms. In the Skid Cities' world, the concept of Nation-State has been mostly abandoned in favor of the concept of Trade Authority. Flags are not used anymore, as they are a national symbol. Trade Authorities retain only the Coat of Arms, used in official communications as a stamp. For example, I designed the coat of arms of the ISTA (Ireland and Scotland Trade Authority):
For this particular coat of arms, I chose to represent the fusion of the Irish arp and the Scottish lion.
Another example is the Coat of Arms of the Autoridad Comercial Mediterránea (or ACM for short), which looks like this:
Once this is done, I move on to the creation of the regional map. The regional map is shown once you select the territory you would like to build on, and it allows you to choose where exactly to build your city. This is important as, depending on where you build your city, the terrain will be different, and you may have different neighboring cities. So first of all, I create the regional map. For example, for the ACM, this is how the regional map looks:
The terrain is generated procedurally based on two factors that depend on where you build your city: humidity and altitude. To determine whether a particular spot is humid or not, I then create a humidity map. This map is used by Skid Cities to procedurally generate your terrain but is never shown to the player. The more the map is dark, the more humidity there will be. So for example for the ACM it looks like this:
I then create an altitude map based on the same concept. In this case, the darker, the fewer mountains there will be in that territory:
This is it for the maps! This is of course not sufficient to be able to add a new territory in-game. The other steps include:
- Writing the lore. I usually do this by writing the Skidpedia, the Wikipedia from 2093. You can check it out here (it's still a work in progress): https://wiki.skidcities.com/
- Create the 3D models of how the territory looks in-game. For example, the Greenland Autonomous Zone is an ice-covered territory with the occasional snowy hill. The Low Lands of Great Florida are swamps where trees are common.
- Decide which organizations have access to the territory and which bonuses are present. For example, Turing Inc. was banned in the Island of California due to its anti-A.I. history of the '40.
I plan to keep adding territories in order to cover the whole world before the full release.
New cars
Right now, there are only two car models traveling in your city: The ones operated by poor citizens - community vans - and rich, faster, green cars. I've always meant to add variety and multiple models, but I never got the time to actually model and texture them. Since now I have a defined color palette that I can use, I felt like it was a good moment to crazy and model a bunch of futuristic cars. I started with the wealthy ones:
And then moved on to the ones used by your poor citizens:
These cars are low-poly style and they use the color palette as their texture. The idea behind this choice is to keep them blazing fast in terms of performance so that it's possible to have thousands of them flying across your city. I can't wait to add them to the game and see what you think!
This is it for this update! Thank you for reading and for supporting this game - it really means the world to me. Thanks!
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Skid Cities is a cyberpunk builder created and developed by me, Vittorio Banfi. I'm a solo developer that is having a lot of fun. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out at https://wiki.skidcities.com/