VIRTUAL CITY MAKER NON GAMES HOW TO
For WSP Opus, it was a question of how to make the serious work of designing and planning infrastructure projects and cities more stimulating-maybe even fun. The VR game was developed with education and engagement in mind. Depending on the choices you make, the city can either thrive and start growing or it can struggle.” And if you haven’t allowed for enough water and power resources, the population starts to be impacted. “So if you choose to create lots of residential and commercial buildings in your city, then the population rises. “It works as a sort of ecosystem,” he explains. Components in the VR game must be in perfect balance or the health of the virtual city plummets, just like in a real-world city. “The elements we chose were those you typically find in a city: water resources, power or energy resources, residential housing, commercial buildings, and transport,” Kidd says. Players place tiles on the board as they advance through five levels of the game, monitoring the progress of their virtual city on a dashboard that shows what each city requires and what players can do to meet those requirements. Taking inspiration from the settlement-building board game Catan, components in Sustain-a-city are modeled as hexagonal tiles. Instead of establishing individual houses and buildings, players put down plots of land and link them together. Sustain-a-city is like a cross between SimCity and LEGO. “So part of creating the Sustain-a-city virtual-reality game was to bring that concept to life and highlight it in a visually compelling way.” “Historically, cities tend to build their different infrastructure elements separately but to create a resilient and future-ready city, you need to look at all these infrastructure elements as an integrated system,” says David Kidd, general manager of client solutions at WSP Opus. Sustain-a-city aims to increase awareness of what it takes to build an actual sustainable city. Developed in partnership with digital creative agency Method, the game lets players create their own thriving, livable smart city by balancing commercial, infrastructure, energy, and residential components. Sustain-a-city is a VR game imagined by New Zealand–based civil engineering and infrastructure consultancy WSP Opus.
But this isn’t your typical video game-it’s an interactive virtual-reality (VR) experience that simulates the process of sustainable urban planning. Move over SimCity, there’s a new city-building game.
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