![]() So download Townscaper here and start molding the world to your will. Though it first released on PC, I think touchscreens are the perfect platform for something like this, and having it in your pocket at all times is just the icing on the cake. ![]() But if you’re open to a town builder that’s akin to a fidget toy you can mess around with at your own leisure whenever the mood strikes, I think you’ll be happy with your purchase. If that’s important to you, then look elsewhere. ![]() ![]() There is no game here, no scores or progression. Build quaint island towns with curvy streets, small hamlets, soaring cathedrals, canal networks, or sky cities on stilts. Townscaper is very forthcoming about what it is. But for now I’m content just poking and prodding at it and molding the towns like they’re a piece of putty. Perhaps I’ll get more serious about the layout once I’m more familiar with how it all works. I’m sure those with more skill and patience can make some eye-popping structures, but I’m having fun just messing around and seeing what happens. There’s also an invisible grid that determines the shape of each block you place, but you can turn it on if you want to have more control over your town’s design. I love when I discover some new type of structure I hadn’t before. I spent a few hours so far fiddling around with Townscaper and it’s equal parts surprising and relaxing. You can also undo all your moves one by one, but I think pressing on a piece to delete it makes more sense if you don’t want to undo a lot of moves at once. You can also remove the sun altogether and make it nighttime, at which point all the windows will light up. There are some settings you can play with, though, like the sun’s position. As far as I can tell, there’s no way to change the color of an existing building. Along the edge there’s a color-picker, which you need to select before plopping a piece down. Aside from that, there’s two-finger zoom in and out, one finger camera rotate and two-finger camera drag. You can build bridges to join buildings from afar or make a crowded colorful village reminiscent of Italy.īesides tapping to build, you can also hold for a second or two to delete a piece. Any houses built on the side of another house without anything below them will grow stilts to support them. You can then build upwards on the house to make a tower or continue building outwards. If you tap on that floating platform, a little house appears. Pick colors from the palette, plop down colored blocks of house on the irregular grid, and watch Townscaper’s underlying algorithm automatically turn those blocks into cute little houses, arches, stairways, bridges and lush backyards, depending on their configuration. For instance, if you tap on the water, a floating platform appears in that spot. Townscaper is an experimental passion project. Everything starts on the water, so all your villages float. The algorithm then does some quick calculations to decide how it should look, based on the other blocks it’s connected to. Here's something I tapped out while writing this post.In Townscaper, all you do is tap on a spot on the grid to plop down a little building block. The URL changes as you build things in the web demo, so you can link folks to your creations. (He also, in-between, made minimalist RTS Bad North). ![]() In 2016, he released a browser planet generator. Brick Block is a clear ancestor of Townscaper. Back in 2015, long before making Townscaper, he released several procedural playthings including Brick Block, an archipelago generator and a city map generator. The inability to make more sprawling villages is important, but it's still absurdly generous as demos go.Ĭreator Oskar Stålberg is no stranger to browser toys. The web version is more or less the game in its entirety, but with a much smaller grid on which to build. It was updated steadily through early access before its final August launch. It's a big box of jumbled lego to click together and see what you make. You playfully, experimentally click to make the buildings grow, and procedural magic forms stairs, windows, and rooftops around your clicks. Townscaper is about pulling little towns from the sea. Maybe you really want to play it on work computers, though, so here you go: a Townscaper web demo playable right in your browser. Townscaper is a delightful toy and only costs £4.79/€5 from Steam. ![]()
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