Building Digital Blueprints: The AI Behind the City Generator

The Vision: A Simple Digital Blueprint

The goal here wasn't to create a complex, populated city simulation. It was much simpler: to build a tool that could generate the *blueprints* of a city. The aim was to create endless variations of urban layouts, not living, breathing worlds. The result is a generator, not a game, and it's intentionally not populated.

The Blueprint: Procedural Generation

The generator uses procedural algorithms to lay out a road network and define where buildings should go. It creates a 2D blueprint of a city. The web-based test is a simple visualization of this blueprint, rendering basic shapes to represent the generated layout. It's a proof-of-concept for the underlying generation logic.

// The core logic is about generating a layout
function generateCityLayout(width, depth) {
    const layout = new CityLayout();
    layout.createRoadGrid(width, depth);
    // The generator outputs a data structure representing the city plan.
    return layout;
}
                

So, Where's the AI?

If the city isn't populated with AI agents, what does the "AI" in the title refer to? In this case, the "AI" is the procedural generation algorithm itself. It's a basic AI that makes simple decisions about how the city should be structured. It decides where to place roads and how to size building plots based on a set of rules. The "intelligence" is in the generation of the blueprint, not in simulating life within it.

Challenges and The "I don't know what I'm doing" Factor

This project is very much a "test" as the title on itch.io suggests. The main challenge was getting the basic generation logic to work reliably. It's a process of trial, error, and seeing what works. There's no complex simulation here—it's a straightforward exploration of procedural generation.

This spirit of experimentation is what drives me. It's not about having all the answers before you start, but about discovering them along the way. I hope you have as much fun exploring the generated city blueprints as I had building the system that creates them.