Very smart of you to go with pre-made assets early in development. Many would be tempted to do it all themselves but with a scope like this it wouldn't be viable.
This exact kind of game (Procedural GTA -like) has been on my game idea list for a while, so it's really cool to see other tinkering with the same sort of idea
Be sure to pool and despawn pedestrians and traffic. Choose simulate or procedural instancing early on. Procedural meaning 100% based on noise functions and thus no interaction; simulate meaning more heavy cpu load unless you find a way to fast forward distant unsimulated blocks.
I was also going to suggest adding water. As someone from Chicago who moved to Cali, having a huge lake or the ocean would really make this come alive.
Add occlusion culling, it really helps with the performance, and i suggest adding a skybox early on in development because it gives the scene more depth, preferrably a skybox with mountains to set a boundary for the world, you also have to add a little bit more post-processing, and perhaps baked lightmaps instead of realtime lighting for the static objects, trust me, optimizing the scene early on in development helps set a benchmark for what performance is to be expected from the game, using this benchmark you could easily see the framerate you have to work with and how much the performance will be affected in later versions of the game, if you leave optimization for last you'll have to reconfigure everything based on your optimizations, and you'll find that you've made lots of unnecessary sacrifices in terms of graphics and gameplay, but overall, good start, keep going!
Very cool! Looking forward to following the development:)) - Would be cool if u could choose your on path like gang, cop, business dude etc - so it was up to the player what kind of life u wanna - maybe if u combined paths u could be a criminal business dude and so on
One thing that really helps when you do procedural generation is to batch your meshes. After generation you can create a script that iterates over all your buildings and parts and joins all meshes with the same materials. It has a massive increase on performance as it reduces the batches dramatically. It works a lot better than just GPU instancing the materials or setting them static. For the NPCs I would just add Navmesh and Navmesh agents. Super easy to implement. Then add state machines for behavior.
Yeah I think it's important to use assets here and there for things you are bad at as a solo developer or the game will never get done. Thanks for the comment!
Yooo, that is actually pretty sick, I tried to make a similar game before but sucked at coding and animating, (more of a Game "lvl designer" and modeler). Excited to see more progress
nice work potentially as your devlogs get longer and more involved, you could do little accompanying vids that explain how you implemented various aspects in each devlog So the devlog could be an overview, and you'd have accompanying sub-devlogs / code-figureout-and-implement-log - code you grabbed ideas from, parts where you were having hassles figuring stuff out, before insight (this is the bit I love - banging your head against a wall for a while, scrounging around, then finally gettting it to work - "oh, yeah!!, take that!!! (lol)), etc, etc e.g obvious one for this log would be how you went about writing the procedural generation
Really cool! I would remove some roads to have intersections with 2 or 3 exits in order to decrease repetition. That would also create long streets like irl. Great work 😁
Love what I've seen so far and I can't wait to see where you take it!! It's been so long since I've seen a devlog gamedev situation that interested me so much! I imagine it turning into a roguelike or something where each run generates completely new areas but also you now have completely random chances at finding NPC's who give out quests, high value world roaming targets like armored cash trucks, etc. Maybe certain districts have higher chances at "end-game" quests that are more patrolled by police, these quests could require that the player has to return to the quest giver to get the reward meaning they have to enter, exit and then return through this challenging area... Maybe if the player is interacting with an enemy that much it might get bland and stale but if the quest is valuable enough and you make the police chases/fights enjoyable to at least complete then I could see it being a fun aspect. Spit balling, throwing my two cents into this dope idea and seeing if any gets your creativity running. Subscribed, can't wait to see where you go with the game!
@OctaDev what you've made so far isn't actually procedurally generated because you're relying on "Random Range", which is obviously, random. Be sure to use "Range.seed" in Unity so your random values are always the same, depending on your seed. It might also be in your best interest to implement this for your "roads". The biggest advantage would be that you can "chunkify" your city, which allows you to "render/calculate" it in realtime and allows your to scale it up enormously.
I am at Uni in England studying Computer Games Programming, so watching other devs working on games is so cool to me, keen to see where you go with this!
Love the progress! maybe out of the scope for what you want to do but height variation of the map and maybe some hills/mountains in the background. Varying street with would help a lot to make it feel more real like the downtown/city area could have 4 or six lanes while the suburbs doesn't have any lane markers
A good way to help and make the fog pop out less would be to make the streets not so straight so that way there's a good cut off as right now the player can see for a long distance so you have to render all of that distance. You might also look into chunk loading and in combination with the previous thing you can only load small chunks of the city at a time to make it smoother.
I like it! I think you should change the way that the roads are made so that they're not all rectangular plots of land. That works well for city and downtown areas, but It would be better for suburbs to be longer, continuous strips. I also think that the road size is a little too big, and that roads that wide should be used for potential highway areas instead.
If you could pull that off its a nice idea for a game. But keep in mind that the scope of the this project is pretty big for a solo developer. But if you keep focusing on the main goal, you might be able to make this game a reality.
At first I was going to say... Wow this is way too big scope for 1 person... Kept watching and got to know your skills and then just well... Wow great video, you have some fab skills and look forward to the devlogs coming.
I am not sure if you have already done this but try to combine as many meshes as possible so that you have less draw calls this will give you a big performance boost
Hi, I don't know if you've already dit it, but for optimization you can check the GPU instancing checkbox on your materials. It basically avoid instancing same meshes multiple times. Good video !
You could try and make the city fairly destructible, like allowing certain objects to be picked up and placed, aswell as buildings be destroyed, allowing players to almost rebuild the city or create a small base within a building or alleyway etc.
The man just got a few assets made a generator and now has a game 👍. Be sure to not take a lot of things at the same time so you won't burnt out your idea seems very likely for you to burn out rather quickly by it
You should check out "amplify impostors" essentially makes a 3d billboard so from like 50m away you have a billboard with like 8verts that can be viewed in a 360 degree angle. Also set up occlusion volumes, and check your texture compression to make sure they aren't too big (aim for
This is soooo cool I think it would be cool if you could get different career paths like being a lawyer or a police officer or a gangster also another possible idea maybe adding actual traffic laws that if broken could lead to a fine decrease in your currency or jail time possible which could be in a prison which is loaded in a different scene and you will stay there for a night when you come out you lose all your money and have to start again maybe that too extreme but would still be cool
Looks nice. Adds a lot to replayability and uniqueness. As a suggestion for npc you add “Goal Orient Action Planning” or Radient Ai system used by games like Skyrim to make the world feel alive. Sundermead developer (Josephus) is also using it.
Hi! You could try implementing Occlusion culling to improve the performance! This technique is often used when you have to display crowded tight cities.
You should add some kind of limit for each kind of building, just to get more residential and bussiness buildings than things like banks, and public property, but I know is a bit hard, so no pressure.
Really cool idea I am interested to see how this project will keep going :) Though I need to mention it as I am working with Unity alot and have a Project that is in active development for multiple years now. Looking at your code its insanley nested. You should really try to get away from nesting everything this much so you will be able to tweak things in the code without having to learn your own code in a few months that happens way too fast sometimes :D
Good luck with your studies! I just graduated with my Bachelor's in CS & if ever feels difficult, just know that you got this & it's worth it! Nice devlog, can't wait to see the game come together 🔥
@@filiphedman4392 to be fair, he should look at making/buying/commissioning/whatever his own assets once he has a solid idea and working prototype. Using pre-made assets is a fantastic way to not get overwhelmed by the sheer scope of a project. Who knows? Certain ideas or things in the world might change completely, and then the time spent making those assets is time that could've been spent on actual progress. And why can't he be proud of his current progress? Many people have the exact same assets without being able to do half of what @octa did. He can most certainly be proud of his own work, pre-made assets or not.
Another way to improve fps could be occlusion culling, so only the assets are rendered that are viewable by your player camera. If you bought some of the Humble Bundles the past 1,5 years there probably is something called Performance Tools in your library.
I have one that I tried, and it was really bad. I looked into unity's built in occlusion culling and it only works for non procedurally generated scenes which is unfortunate.
I made a discord so that we interact easily for anyone interested.
discord.gg/c9zKXDWPBY
Warning: The server is OP
Hey! I’m also currently developing a game, nice to see other devs sharing their experience. Maybe I should make content about my development.
I did this at one point and realized making a procedurally generated city isn't the hard part, making a fun game out of it is.
Really ? I find it hard ... could you show me some creator that explains the logic and code please.
@@fodk7021 You should definitely check out Sebastian Lague's videos.
@@yusufziyakaraaslan5691 I already did I am stuck with making biomes and blending them....
@@fodk7021 you can find some simple procedural generation algorithms that are pretty simple to implement
@@barkmober I have been searching for a year now and still nothing
I can’t wait to see future devlogs and how your channel grows over time!
Thanks, I didn't expect the video to do this well. I'm glad you enjoyed!
Same
Very smart of you to go with pre-made assets early in development. Many would be tempted to do it all themselves but with a scope like this it wouldn't be viable.
Yeah it's important to be realistic as a solo developer
@@bestgamedev Nail the prototype and someone else will fund the art
Very cool! The procedural generation looks good; you did a great job.
Thanks, I really enjoy algorithmic coding problems so it was a fun challenge.
This exact kind of game (Procedural GTA -like) has been on my game idea list for a while, so it's really cool to see other tinkering with the same sort of idea
my man is speedrun-developing procedurally generated gta and its working lol
looking forward to next vids :D
Be sure to pool and despawn pedestrians and traffic. Choose simulate or procedural instancing early on.
Procedural meaning 100% based on noise functions and thus no interaction; simulate meaning more heavy cpu load unless you find a way to fast forward distant unsimulated blocks.
Make the city have a boundary at its edges or make them island. Just add some kind of way for the city to end.
Yeah I'm not sure if I want water, mountains, hills or something else.
@@bestgamedev maybe a combination of all three to add more depth to the world
I was also going to suggest adding water. As someone from Chicago who moved to Cali, having a huge lake or the ocean would really make this come alive.
@@bestgamedev rivers could work, since cities are built near or between rivers in real life
@@Tylermanguy58 I would suggest keeping it simple for the beginning
Add occlusion culling, it really helps with the performance, and i suggest adding a skybox early on in development because it gives the scene more depth, preferrably a skybox with mountains to set a boundary for the world, you also have to add a little bit more post-processing, and perhaps baked lightmaps instead of realtime lighting for the static objects, trust me, optimizing the scene early on in development helps set a benchmark for what performance is to be expected from the game, using this benchmark you could easily see the framerate you have to work with and how much the performance will be affected in later versions of the game, if you leave optimization for last you'll have to reconfigure everything based on your optimizations, and you'll find that you've made lots of unnecessary sacrifices in terms of graphics and gameplay, but overall, good start, keep going!
Very cool! Looking forward to following the development:)) - Would be cool if u could choose your on path like gang, cop, business dude etc - so it was up to the player what kind of life u wanna - maybe if u combined paths u could be a criminal business dude and so on
One thing that really helps when you do procedural generation is to batch your meshes. After generation you can create a script that iterates over all your buildings and parts and joins all meshes with the same materials. It has a massive increase on performance as it reduces the batches dramatically. It works a lot better than just GPU instancing the materials or setting them static. For the NPCs I would just add Navmesh and Navmesh agents. Super easy to implement. Then add state machines for behavior.
Amazing devlog! I’m looking forward to your future videos
This looks cool 👍 the fact that you are using models instead of cubes makes it 10 times better. Can't wait to see what you do with it.
Yeah I think it's important to use assets here and there for things you are bad at as a solo developer or the game will never get done. Thanks for the comment!
Looks Great !
Yooo, that is actually pretty sick, I tried to make a similar game before but sucked at coding and animating, (more of a Game "lvl designer" and modeler). Excited to see more progress
nice work
potentially as your devlogs get longer and more involved,
you could do little accompanying vids that explain how you
implemented various aspects in each devlog
So the devlog could be an overview, and you'd have
accompanying sub-devlogs /
code-figureout-and-implement-log - code you
grabbed ideas from, parts where you were having
hassles figuring stuff out, before insight (this is
the bit I love - banging your head against a wall
for a while, scrounging around, then finally gettting
it to work - "oh, yeah!!, take that!!! (lol)),
etc, etc
e.g obvious one for this log would be how you went about
writing the procedural generation
Really cool! I would remove some roads to have intersections with 2 or 3 exits in order to decrease repetition. That would also create long streets like irl. Great work 😁
Love what I've seen so far and I can't wait to see where you take it!! It's been so long since I've seen a devlog gamedev situation that interested me so much! I imagine it turning into a roguelike or something where each run generates completely new areas but also you now have completely random chances at finding NPC's who give out quests, high value world roaming targets like armored cash trucks, etc. Maybe certain districts have higher chances at "end-game" quests that are more patrolled by police, these quests could require that the player has to return to the quest giver to get the reward meaning they have to enter, exit and then return through this challenging area... Maybe if the player is interacting with an enemy that much it might get bland and stale but if the quest is valuable enough and you make the police chases/fights enjoyable to at least complete then I could see it being a fun aspect. Spit balling, throwing my two cents into this dope idea and seeing if any gets your creativity running. Subscribed, can't wait to see where you go with the game!
I do like Polygon's assets
I'm actually looking forward to see where this game goes
I love the idea and love the project (and luv u too) I hope you continue like that😁👌
Thanks glad you loved everything!
Adding different types of roads will also add to the immersion. Have some one way streets, gravel roads, back lanes, etc.
Yeah thats a good idea for the future
Looks promising, waiting for next video update!
@OctaDev what you've made so far isn't actually procedurally generated because you're relying on "Random Range", which is obviously, random. Be sure to use "Range.seed" in Unity so your random values are always the same, depending on your seed. It might also be in your best interest to implement this for your "roads".
The biggest advantage would be that you can "chunkify" your city, which allows you to "render/calculate" it in realtime and allows your to scale it up enormously.
This is an amazing project and dev log!
found your video through yt recommendation feed, and im not disappointed! keep up the great work man! :D
I'm happy you enjoyed it!
I am at Uni in England studying Computer Games Programming, so watching other devs working on games is so cool to me, keen to see where you go with this!
Watched this on my TV, great devlog!
This looks really cool! Looking forward to the next one
Thanks!
Love the progress!
maybe out of the scope for what you want to do but height variation of the map and maybe some hills/mountains in the background.
Varying street with would help a lot to make it feel more real like the downtown/city area could have 4 or six lanes while the suburbs doesn't have any lane markers
I'm really looking forward for this!
Very good quality first video and i am looking forward to following the progress!
Can't wait for the future update!
A good way to help and make the fog pop out less would be to make the streets not so straight so that way there's a good cut off as right now the player can see for a long distance so you have to render all of that distance. You might also look into chunk loading and in combination with the previous thing you can only load small chunks of the city at a time to make it smoother.
Good idea, I will have to look into it
Keep it up mate
Looks like me and you both, me and a friend just got started on a VR game and I think the concept is solid but a challenge
I like it! I think you should change the way that the roads are made so that they're not all rectangular plots of land. That works well for city and downtown areas, but It would be better for suburbs to be longer, continuous strips. I also think that the road size is a little too big, and that roads that wide should be used for potential highway areas instead.
If you could pull that off its a nice idea for a game. But keep in mind that the scope of the this project is pretty big for a solo developer. But if you keep focusing on the main goal, you might be able to make this game a reality.
Very cool! I always love checking out what fellow game devs are working on. You got my sub, looking forward to your next devlog
Thanks!
Wow! That’s very cool! I’m already waiting for the next video... 😍
Coming soon!
looks really cool so far!
Stay committed! I love the idea and it could be a really great game!
Fingers crossed!
At first I was going to say... Wow this is way too big scope for 1 person... Kept watching and got to know your skills and then just well... Wow great video, you have some fab skills and look forward to the devlogs coming.
Thanks a ton
I am not sure if you have already done this but try to combine as many meshes as possible so that you have less draw calls this will give you a big performance boost
You are So Underrated dude! Cant wait for part 2
Thank you so much! Part 2 is coming out on Thursday.
@@bestgamedev Cool im excited!
Nice work, the procedural generation for the building looks very good, with some lighting and post-processing it will be even better
Yeah I can't wait to make the city come to life in the next couple of devlogs
bro it’s sick to see another game dev on yt keep going this idea is lit
Cool video look forward to see what you come up with.
Wow this video really shows the power of premade assets,
Good luck on the project
Thanks!
Subscribed!!!
I gotta see future devlogs. Please don't take too long
Thanks! I plan on posting once a month. I know it's pretty long but I want to make sure I have some good stuff to show!
I really like your approach of doing what you like and using assets for the rest. your devlog feels so inspiring to me :D
For the first devlog, the game look amazing. I can't wait to see more of this! Keep up the work homie
this is insane. honestly speechless by what you’ve been able to do so far. can’t wait to see your progress on it
Thank you so much!!
great video man you are gonna be growing fast
Sounds amazing. I can't wait to see more of this. I will definitely be subscribing now
Sick video, you should include links to the assets you use from the asset store! Some of them seem rly cool
This is amazing, I'm really excited for the upcoming vids!
Very nice. Looking forward to more devlogs.
Good luck on the project!
The quality of the video is great for a first upload =)
Thanks! I appreciate it.
Interesting hope you keep making videos
This project seems like it could really go places, and I would definitely follow it if it does, but just be aware of the giant scope of this project.
Yep I am planning on working on this for a while. Hopefully I don't burn out
Bro you made a good video with good content, keep up with that and you'll have success!
Hi, I don't know if you've already dit it, but for optimization you can check the GPU instancing checkbox on your materials. It basically avoid instancing same meshes multiple times. Good video !
This looks really interesting. Well done on the initial progress, pretty decent!
Thank you!
You could try and make the city fairly destructible, like allowing certain objects to be picked up and placed, aswell as buildings be destroyed, allowing players to almost rebuild the city or create a small base within a building or alleyway etc.
Please keep it up want to see more.
Wave function collapse might be an idea as an algorithm that could make the city more realistic and less random feeling
This already looks really good! I'm really excited to see the progress on this project!!
Thanks!
Im excited to see the outcome. I wish you luck on the journey!
The man just got a few assets made a generator and now has a game 👍. Be sure to not take a lot of things at the same time so you won't burnt out your idea seems very likely for you to burn out rather quickly by it
I will try not to!
Very impressive! ChatGPT is an absolute lifesaver. Looking forward to following the journey!
Thank you! Chatgpt is great
Exiting! Looking forward to the next vid :)
For visuals, add low-level cell shading and a better skybox
wow you just hit 100 subs! blowing up already lol, great start!
I know, isn't it crazy! Thanks for the support
You deserve every sub !! Great devlog btw
I appreciate that!
You should check out "amplify impostors" essentially makes a 3d billboard so from like 50m away you have a billboard with like 8verts that can be viewed in a 360 degree angle. Also set up occlusion volumes, and check your texture compression to make sure they aren't too big (aim for
Make the city load and unload in chunks so that the performance can be better
Also amazing work buddy keep it up..
Looking great so far! Excited to see more.
this is similar to a project im thinking of working on ill def be checking in on ur progress!
Very cool!
Suggestion though: you should make the transition between city and suburbs smoother
This inspires me even more. Considering I will be going into software engineering for college this year
That's awesome! Software engineering is a great career path.
I love it so far interested to see the future 🙌🙌🙌🙌🙌🙌 all the best for the journey 🙌🙌🙌🙌
Thank you so much!
I think you need some kind of boundry district between the city and the suburb so the change in building style isn't so noticable...
Noted
Looks cool so far, good luck man 👌
This is soooo cool I think it would be cool if you could get different career paths like being a lawyer or a police officer or a gangster also another possible idea maybe adding actual traffic laws that if broken could lead to a fine decrease in your currency or jail time possible which could be in a prison which is loaded in a different scene and you will stay there for a night when you come out you lose all your money and have to start again maybe that too extreme but would still be cool
That's a neat idea! Really excited to see it come around!
Can't wait!
nice! i love procedurally generated stuff
Looks nice. Adds a lot to replayability and uniqueness. As a suggestion for npc you add “Goal Orient Action Planning” or Radient Ai system used by games like Skyrim to make the world feel alive. Sundermead developer (Josephus) is also using it.
You should make it to where you can get a plane between procedurally generated islands in game
Looks great! Keep it up. Can't wait to see the progression
Hi! You could try implementing Occlusion culling to improve the performance! This technique is often used when you have to display crowded tight cities.
I tried, but unity doesn't have it built in for procedural scenes
You should add some kind of limit for each kind of building, just to get more residential and bussiness buildings than things like banks, and public property, but I know is a bit hard, so no pressure.
You could add occlusion culling for an extra performance boost
Super hype! Subbed and liked 👍 😊
Really cool idea I am interested to see how this project will keep going :)
Though I need to mention it as I am working with Unity alot and have a Project that is in active development for multiple years now. Looking at your code its insanley nested. You should really try to get away from nesting everything this much so you will be able to tweak things in the code without having to learn your own code in a few months that happens way too fast sometimes :D
Good luck with your studies! I just graduated with my Bachelor's in CS & if ever feels difficult, just know that you got this & it's worth it! Nice devlog, can't wait to see the game come together 🔥
Super impressive progress for the first dev log.
Thanks, it's amazing what you can get done during a 2 week break from school.
@@bestgamedev You should make assets yourself tho. It's hard being proud of things you didn't make.
@@filiphedman4392 to be fair, he should look at making/buying/commissioning/whatever his own assets once he has a solid idea and working prototype. Using pre-made assets is a fantastic way to not get overwhelmed by the sheer scope of a project. Who knows? Certain ideas or things in the world might change completely, and then the time spent making those assets is time that could've been spent on actual progress.
And why can't he be proud of his current progress? Many people have the exact same assets without being able to do half of what @octa did. He can most certainly be proud of his own work, pre-made assets or not.
Since you're making a city, occlusion culling would boost your fps a bunch if done properly. Good luck with the project man.
Another way to improve fps could be occlusion culling, so only the assets are rendered that are viewable by your player camera. If you bought some of the Humble Bundles the past 1,5 years there probably is something called Performance Tools in your library.
I have one that I tried, and it was really bad. I looked into unity's built in occlusion culling and it only works for non procedurally generated scenes which is unfortunate.
I can already tell this man is gonna be the next
Dani, and this game is gonna go big