You can research a real city for a game remotely by combining maps and aerial views, street-level imagery, local plans and archives, and your own sketches or blockouts. The key is to start with a design question, use each source for what it can actually show, and adapt the strongest spatial and visual references for play.
Start with the design question, not a folder of images
Before browsing, decide what the level needs to learn from the city. You might need a street hierarchy, a route between landmarks, a neighborhood’s visual character, a distinctive skyline, or a way public space meets building fronts. A focused question helps you choose useful locations and notice relevant details instead of collecting references without a purpose.
- For navigation: study major routes, intersections, edges, and landmarks.
- For atmosphere: look for recurring building forms, materials, street furniture, and relationships between buildings and public space.
- For gameplay: identify sightlines, chokepoints, alternate paths, and places where the player can pause, hide, or change direction.
Scout from city scale down to pedestrian height
Use maps or aerial imagery first to understand how a location fits into the surrounding city: block shapes, nearby routes, water, boundaries, and the distance between landmarks. Then switch to street-level imagery to inspect proportions, façades, sidewalks, visible materials, and what a pedestrian can see from the ground.
This remote-scoping approach has a documented game-development example. Jake Strasser’s 2021 GDC talk describes using Google Street View to scout real locations that suited the design needs of Untitled Goose Game. The resulting levels combined selected real spaces with gameplay affordances and aesthetic restrictions. Watch the GDC session.
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Street imagery is evidence of what was visible from a particular viewpoint when it was captured—not a complete or necessarily current record of a place. Coverage and capture dates vary, and imagery cannot establish unseen interiors, access, or present-day conditions.
Use local records for geometry and history
For a landmark, civic space, or building that matters to the level, look beyond consumer map imagery. Municipal open-data portals, planning documents, government records, and architectural archives may contain building footprints, plans, street sections, historic imagery, or formal designs.
The Level Design Book’s research guidance recommends virtual visits with Street View and consulting government or architectural archives for plans and blueprints. Plans can clarify geometry and formal intent, but they may be incomplete or fail to convey how a space feels at pedestrian height or how it appears today.
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Choose each research method for the evidence it provides
| Method | Useful for | Limits to check |
|---|---|---|
| Maps and aerial imagery | Neighborhood structure, routes, block shapes, water, edges, and relative position | May lack street-level character or current detail |
| Street View or equivalent street imagery | Building fronts, sidewalk relationships, visible materials, street furniture, and pedestrian viewpoints | Coverage and capture dates vary; imagery cannot establish unseen interiors or access |
| Government plans and architectural archives | Building footprints, plans, historic development, and formal street or civic designs | Records may be incomplete, hard to locate, or detached from current appearance |
| City open data and GIS layers | Structured street, building, terrain, and other geospatial information | Accuracy, schema, date, licensing, and processing effort vary |
| Sketches, paintovers, and study blockouts | Turning observations into an understanding of proportion, route, and layout | They are analysis aids and do not validate the source data by themselves |
For every reference, record its source and URL, the location it depicts, any visible capture or publication date, and the design question it helps answer. Also note what it cannot establish. A useful evidence mix depends on whether you need visual inspiration, reliable spatial relationships, or geometry that can be brought into an engine.
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Turn observations into a spatial study
Do more than save screenshots. The Level Design Book recommends gathering references, studying them closely, taking notes or making sketches, and using paintovers when game geometry is inaccessible. Mark paths, nodes, edges, repeated forms, sightlines, and major landmarks. These marks help reveal why a place feels organized as it does.
Before making the final playable layout, build a temporary accuracy-focused map or blockout. Use it to ask what is actually there and how spaces connect. The point is to understand construction and flow; the study does not need to become the shipped level.
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Adapt the real place to make a playable city
A game level is an interpretation, not a requirement to reproduce every street or building. Preserve the features that establish a place and support the game, then adjust scale, access, routes, or sightlines to make the environment legible and paced for play. The Untitled Goose Game example likewise describes combining source locations with gameplay affordances and aesthetic restrictions.
In a 2017 article on videogame cities, urban designer Konstantinos Dimopoulos put the governing principle succinctly: “Game cities must always make sense.” Read the article at Game Developer. A level can depart from its reference, but its routes and spatial logic still need to feel coherent to the player.
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Most projects can begin with maps, street imagery, plans, screenshots, and sketches. A GIS pipeline becomes more relevant when the design depends on substantial real terrain, building footprints, or repeatable spatial data. Even then, geographic data is a starting point rather than a finished environment.
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Esri Canada’s 2023 Toronto Complete Streets project describes using Toronto open-data building and street information in a Unity visualization. The team improved building layers and adapted a basemap after finding that some details did not work well for ground-level viewing. The example shows why data layers need curation and presentation decisions. Read the Esri Canada case study.
Esri’s Project Lake Ontario account describes processing lidar and imagery into terrain and buildings for a Unity game, while noting that some lidar and surrounding imagery came from different collection times. Its reported 10-week undergraduate summer project is specific to that project, not a general estimate for reconstructing a city. Read the Esri account.
A 2026 ISPRS-Archives paper documents another route: processing CityGML data with Blender and rendering it interactively in Godot. The authors describe geometry repair, reprojection, level-of-detail decisions, and collision geometry as pipeline tasks. In a Yokohama participatory urban-design workshop, they report that approximately 50 elementary-school students placed 1,192 assets without system failure on six standard classroom computers. That result describes their particular workshop and pipeline, not a general performance benchmark. Read the 2026 paper.
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Check dates, access, and reuse before relying on data
Geographic usefulness does not guarantee that a source reflects current conditions. Capture dates, data collection dates, generalization, and modeling choices can affect what imagery or GIS layers show. For a specific city project, check the local portal’s metadata, the source’s date, its coverage and granularity, and the applicable reuse terms before building on or publishing derived material.
For a small location study, remote imagery and local documents may be enough. For a larger data-driven environment, structured GIS data can save manual tracing but adds work in finding, processing, repairing, and presenting it. Choose the workflow according to what the game actually needs to represent.
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