City Building Workshop

Join your peers and game urbanist Konstantinos Dimopoulos in a world-building workshop, and collaboratively create an imaginary city. Pens, pencils, paper, and online whiteboards will all be used to construct and flesh out a city that has never existed before; a city that will be able to fit perfectly into a game.

Please bring your laptop to this workshop.

11 Questions for a Great Video Game City

Cities are everywhere in games; from Bloodborne's Yharnam to Disco Elysium's Revachol and from Cyberpunk 2077's Night City to Dishonored's Dunwall, cities are rich, fertile, and memorable gameplay and storytelling stages. They are complex worlds to be explored and savored. They are game levels to be filled with challenges, stories, and characters. They are places to be traversed and played in.

This talk will present its audience with the 11 fundamental questions designers need to answer in order to create believable, immersive, and actually unique urban worlds for their games. Every question will be answered through the lenses of game design, world building, narrative and level design, and will be supported by both real world and video game examples. Additionally, the talk will also cover the basics of designing cities for video games and explain what game urbanism is all about.

These are the 11 questions I will be tackling:
-Where is the city?
-When is the city?
-Why was this city founded?
-How Big is the city?
-Where do people Live and Work?
-How do people and things move around?
-What is the city's Structure?
-What's the Architecture like?
-Can you describe the Society and the city's Theme?
-What Stories does this city tell?
-What Game is this place for?