I am currently working on my own small mobile game; as a foundation for learning Unreal Engine 5. Whilst the game is not announced yet, I decided to share some progress of one of the systems I have built; a grid based city-generator. Here is my progress so far!

The environments in the game will be set in cities with an isometric camera view; and I needed a way for each level to generate a pre-defined city shape with flexibility for visually tweaking the layout and also allow for some procedural elements. By default, the city generator just composes an x by y grid of buildings like this:

For a better and more organic shape, I am using procedural shaders to render out a building mask LUT at runtime. These are then read by my city generator system (built using Blueprints) to generate a city shape depending on pixel value. The shader can either receive a mask as a texture and/or combine this with shader math to create more unpredictable shapes.

This also gives an opportunity to experiment with using Lumen and Nanite with runtime generated content!

Assets Used

City Kit (Commercial) by Kenney