Epic published an article with Aleksey Yurkin and Max Rybalchenko about the secrets of city building behind The Sinking City.
Here are the first three steps:
Step 1
Step 2 – Create prefabs. Prefabs are what you might call presets of an area type/the buildings you might find in a given neighbourhood. So, what we do is we create prefabs of building types that have their own specific rules, such as rich houses, poor shacks, destroyed, full, specific architectural style, commercial, housing, etc. We build these prefabs based the library of elements that we created in step one. And once we created our prefabs, that’s when the magic will slowly happen…but, there’s just one more step to the finale.
Step 3 – Create a City Grid. Based on our research, concept pieces, narration, and our very own architects, we create a 2D vector of a city grid. Within it, we also specify the different area types, such as “in this area of the city, that’s where the rich area is, while over here, that’s where the commercial zone will be” (this is a very simplified version of the long discussions that we had on this topic, but we hope you know what we mean). And now, for the trick.
Make sure to learn about the other three steps and get more details on the game production here.