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KONSTANTINOS DIMOPOULOS 
GAME URBANIST,  GAME DESIGNER





With a PhD in urban planning and geography, a MSc in city and regional planning,
an engineering diploma, and almost 15 years of experience in the gaming
industry, I can help shape the urban environments, city designs, geographies,
and mechanics and narratives of your game.



As a game urbanist and game designer I consult on matters of imaginary urbanism,
build and plan virtual cities, fix civic mistakes, provide additional
world-building or brand new settings, create maps, design living, breathing,
immersive urban environments, help abstract existing places to fit any gaming
project, create rules for simulations, and design interactive/playable cities
from the ground up.



I am also available for talks, workshops, and lectures, as well as for

freelance and contract work as a game, narrative and level designer.



DESIGNING CITIES FOR VIDEO GAMES - THE COURSE

Learn how to design memorable and believable cities for video games, in a 7 week
course run by me, featuring live lectures & workshops, assignments with
feedback, and asynchronous content all fundamentals will be covered. By the end
of the course you will be concepting, understanding, and designing playable
cities, and you will be able to combine the principles of urbanism, game design,
and level design to enrich the games and settings you are working on.

Enroll on Maven: maven.com/dimopoulos/designing-cities



The Cities of Games

 

Every city and urban environment that appears in a game is either a game city or
part of a game city.

A game city that functions, looks, sounds, and behaves realistically, whether in
the far reaches of the universe or deep within an enchanted forest, is a
believable city; an immersive city -- a quality city. 























The digital cityscapes of gaming are made of bitmaps, textures, texts, sounds,
and/or polygons. They do not need to be sustainable or cater to the needs of
actual societies. Reality's constrains do not apply to virtual cities, and yet
the cities of gaming do have to evoke reality if they are to allow our
suspension of disbelief. They have to adapt our expectations of urban centers
and city life to exotic, historic or abstracted virtual cities, while also
knowing when to subvert common knowledge, and when to ignore design's good
practices in order to engineer specific feelings. They have to be clever, pithy
illusions based on our understanding of existing, historical, and imaginary
urbanism.

 

Game cities need to be legible, believable, and --crucially-- memorable, while
always enabling, supporting and enhancing the gameplay, theme and narrative of
each project.    



Featured projects:






WHAT IS GAME URBANISM?



Game urbanism is the discipline that tackles, designs, and researches cities in
games.

 

Cities in video (and analog) games are everywhere. From simple-yet-evocative
backgrounds in arcade offerings and intriguing maps in adventure games, to
sprawling open worlds and stealthy RPG levels, urban environments are a major,
and indeed varied, ingredient of the majority of games.  



And yet ancient, fantasy, contemporary, sci-fi, stylized, historical or
cyberpunk cities are not always given the attention they need. Even when
designers do get them right, they almost never take advantage of the immense
storytelling, thematic, and game & level design opportunities a rich and
realistic urban environment provides. 



Then again, creating a city from scratch is admittedly a daunting and difficult
task.

 

Where should one start from? How many streets would be enough? What should said
streets be made of? How is the street network organized? Are there pavements?
What about urban furniture or street art? What sorts of people and/or beings are
usually seen roaming those streets during the day? During the night? Should
every street have the same width? And how could I hide the short length of my
in-game streets? Is there more to a city than streets? 



What about architecture? Urban character? What do open and public spaces look
like? Are there any? And where should one place a palace in relation to the
dungeon and the factory district? How many and what sort of inhabitants would a
place require to feel right? Are there slums and wealthy districts? Where? How
about rivers and hills? Infrastructure? Does the place need a functioning
economy? A history? How can we show city life and project a strong and memorable
urban image?



Those are the exact kinds of questions that I, as a game urbanist & designer,
can answer (and expand on) according to your project's needs, before going on
and creating your city's plans, simulation models, detailed descriptions of
everyday life or even the GIS mapping of your interactive regions, settlements,
and urban centers. 



What's more, I can help you avoid all the immersion-breaking urban aspects
designers of game cities, and level designers usually get wrong. Spotting and
fixing all too common problems is an important part of my urban consulting work;
problems such as a town not making sense on any real map, a city lacking spatial
coherence, a supposed metropolis with a too obvious population of a mere 100
people, a central avenue feeling too short and empty, glaring omissions,
atmosphere-damaging anachronisms, or even drop-in bars located in the middle of
the urban wasteland.



Of course, troubleshooting is not enough to carry your project all the way
towards the creation of a living, breathing, unique, memorable, and thus
believable game city. A successful city, you see, has to feel real, and in order
to feel real its complexities and major characteristics have to be understood.
And analysed. And then toyed with. Dark alleys sporting deadly urban fauna must
feel plausible, as even high-fantasy worlds need consistency. An urban fantasy
environment that feels concrete will make the game it is supporting feel
believable itself.



There are countless details that can make places breathe, and instantly help a
city come to life. Realizing, however, that cities are much more than the sum of
their roads and buildings is crucial when it comes to crafting them. Cities are
also their societies, functions, people, systems, climates, colours, styles,
shops, topographies, local beliefs, collective and pesonal histories, sounds,
smells, public art, and an amazing variety of other things -- all these, I can
help you discover, create, distill, and use. 



My help on such matters of the city involves everything from the application of
urban planning on level design -- along with many sketches -- to districts
modeled in 3D (or with Lego bricks), and quite a bit of world building. It's
crucial to keep the urban layer as something integral to the rest of the
creative process. My work aims to further inspire game, level, and narrative
designers (also developers and artists), and provide them with a fertile
environment packed with new ideas, mechanics, solutions, and tools. To offer a
way towards building the illusion of a real place rather than that of a
film-set.



PORTFOLIO / PROJECTS:

Crime Boss: Rockay City

Worked on the design of Rockay City itself; a place for players, Michael Madsen,
Kim Basinger, Chuck Norris, and, above all, Danny Trejo to go wild shooting each
other.

The Sinking City

Urban consulting work for Frogwares' H.P. Lovecraft inspired open world horror
game The Sinking City.

Lake Game

Urban planning, and consulting for narrative-heavy open world game Lake by
gamious.

Seed

Assisting with the creation of the tools and rules that will allow the players
of MMO Seed to create their very own cities and towns.

Virtual Cities

An Atlas & Exploration of Video Game Cities (covering 45 video game cities)

ARMA Reforger

Geographic consultation, and urban design work on tactical shooter ARMA
Reforger.

CityCraft

My game urbanism column in Wireframe magazine.

Ex Novo

A pen-and-paper game casting 1-4 players as the genius loci that guides the
evolution of settlement. Essentially a city building tool/game.

Game Writing 2nd Edition

Contributed the chapter 'The Tales Cities Tell' to Chris Bateman's 2nd edition
of Game Writing.

Show More


PEOPLE I HAVE WORKED WITH:

















GET IN TOUCH
 

If you are in need of assistance with your game's cities, would like to discuss
any sort of urban interactive environment, or if you simply want to say hello,
do not hesitate to get in touch with me on konstantinos.dimopoulos@gmail.com.



 * 
 * 
 * 

Konstantinos Dimopoulos --  Urbanist of Imaginary Places, Level & Game Designer,
Author. Educator.


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