Urban/Manmade Environment Research

Garbage City

This is Garbage city, near Cairo in Egypt. Garbage city is an extremely large collection of low grade buildings without any real info structure, the people there have no way of disposing of their garbage so the city just piles up. The citizens of the city have made their own jobs out of the mess, they sift through the piles of garbage to find anything they can repair, reuse or sell.

This scene reminds me of the chase scene in The Incredible Hulk movie, running across buildings to flee the pursuing agents. This is a wild idea that I don’t see panning out but in my mind I thought of having the map as rooftops and what would usually be walls in a regular MOBA map would be gaps in the buildings. These could obviously be jumped over using blink abilities like In other MOBA games.

Beijing

Beijing city in China, this city is highly industrialised city with some truly interesting building design. One that caught my eye was the Sofitel Wanda hotel which looks like it’s ripped right out of a sci-fi movie city. For my arena theme these kinds of futuristic looking structures will fit right in.

New York

New York City, the well-known sky scraper skyline has been used as a jumping off point for many science fiction cities. The high-rise buildings a mixture of both old and new, neon lights and signs at night all add to the overwhelming sight. I know of two examples of New York itself being updated in media to be futuristic versions of its current self. The movie the Fifth Element and Doctor Who both have their own iterations of the city. I will research them both in my next stage of research.

Castle Cities

This is the Castle city from the Disney movie Tangled, the modern remake of Rapunzel. I looked into a bunch of real world castles and didn’t find the kind of thing I was looking for. After this I decided to look into fictional castles, this was the best image I could get of the castle. This castle city is built up an island hill and the city itself kind of winds up and around the hill up to the castle. I think that the castle cities won’t feature too prominently in the arena design but may come into some of the later work for character lore.

This is Kings Landing from the Game of Thrones TV show. Another fictional walled castle city, this city is well designed to withstand sieges. Looking at the layout of the city in this image I think the castles may work as the bases at each end the map.

This is the White City from Lord of the Rings, a highly built up city in the side of a mountain face. It has a very imposing look, I think this too will be more of a character lore related reference.