townscaper game sourced
Townscaper
A town-building toy in which clicking colored blocks onto an irregular grid lets a wave function collapse solver assemble houses, arches, stairways, bridges, and gardens, with no goals or resources.
parts
3 mechanics, as Townscaper does themcore · 1
Procedural build assist
Each block edit reruns a marching-cubes-style module lookup and a wave function collapse over affected cells, then adds windows, chimneys, and bushes; delay grows with structure size.
supporting · 2
Building placement
Colored blocks are added or removed anywhere on the grid, stacked vertically.
Room recognition
Enclosed areas are detected and filled with gardens rather than paving.
core loop
click to add or remove a colored block on the irregular grid -> the solver picks modules for that cell and its neighbors -> arches, stairs, roofs, and gardens appear -> keep editing
design notes
The grid is a subdivided, jittered hex grid of irregular quads, and each edit triggers a real-time wave function collapse that narrows the valid corner modules for the changed cells and their neighbors before decoration is applied. The player expresses only occupancy and color; all architectural detail is derived, which makes the game a pure case of procedural build assist. It is a boundary case because nothing evolves without the player; its author calls it more of a toy than a game.
Wave Function Collapse and constraint-based tile generation