Urban Planning in Games

In this GDC 2024 session, examine all the basic steps of city creation, why urban planning is important for game environments, and how it can be useful for creating readable and distinguished urban space.

GDC returns to San Francisco in March 2025! For more information, be sure to visit our website and follow the #GDC2025 hashtag on social media.

Subscribe to the GDC newsletter and get regular updates via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or RSS.

GDC talks cover a range of developmental topics including game design, programming, audio, visual arts, business management, production, online games, and much more. We post a fresh GDC video every day. Subscribe to the channel to stay on top of regular updates, and check out GDC Vault for thousands of more in-depth talks from our archives.

[Schekelstein]

Very interesting talk. Nightcity was a masterpiece of architecture. The way they played with building sizes and the spaces between those megastructures where you have this claustrophobic spaces in which you feel swallowed by the city, but still can glance trough the layers of streets and bridges between buildings above and beside you and still have an idea where you are.

[ArtofWEZ]

I never fast travelled even once in this game, it's so beautiful. Thanks for the talk.

[tengerzander]

Very cool video, city design knowledge transfered into game city design and that knowledge is been respected.

[simulacrae]

I like that CDPR wanted to make the most dystopian hellhole ever but accidentally made one of the most walkable cities ever. If they wanted dread and dystopia the should have just modeled it after Houston or Los Angeles instead.

[JenkinsOwen]

God I really do wish the GDC channel would have the god damn common sense to include the name of the lecturer ANYWHERE in the video/description

[PlebNC]

Ah, so this is person responsible for me enjoying walking around Night City instead of fast travelling everywhere.

[ideallyyours]

45:07 pretty sure that's Erwin Heyms

[curioussoul]

Thank you so much! I learned a lot with your presentation

[tristanmestroni]

Any time I decided to fast travel in Cyberpunk I felt like an absolute narc.

[monfera]

Who is the presenter? Don’t immediately see it in the title, description, transcript or anywhere in the video.

[daniilnoun]

No disrespect to the presenter, but why is she presenting this for 2077 when she joined the company in 2022? At most she would have worked on Phantom Liberty, which is a tiny part of the city, and even then I am not sure since they probably had some idea for the planning in 2021 already.

[iFukuyama]

It felt like she was answering a different question for every question. Her reaction to the last question was especially weird.

[HighQualityLeftover]

Minimalism is just rich people trying to cosplay as poor. Brutalism is rich people trying to cosplay their house like the poor.

Trust me, no one at the edge of financial existance ever thought "hm i think i have too much clutter in my appartment"

[danielkjm]

Cool, shame the game was terrible, all that verticality, only to fall into buildings, Invisible walls and no mission exploring that.

[huiAPPOAJ]

they spent so much time building the city they forgot to make a good game