Say an RPG developer used a tabletop role-playing system to sketch out the design of a new video game? I sleep; tell me the creators of the Kerbal Space Program used another sim, the most popular city builder of the past decade, to create a map for a model plane flight simulation. I can't think of a better PC game solution for indie game development.

I recently spoke with Felipe "HarvesteR" Faranghe about Kitbash Model Club, a revamped version of a game he first released in Early Access in 2021. At the time it was called Balsa Model Flight Simulator, but Falanghe explained the new name, new publisher, and new scope.

Then we began to talk about the map. Kitbash Model Club is set in a bay with two islands in the middle; Balsa started as a VR dogfighting game, so details were originally sparse. However, the space needed to be more complex, as it needed to be able to be explored on foot and from the perspective of a small model vehicle. It was also nine times larger than before; how did they pull it off, despite being a small indie team of three?

"We had to rethink our entire approach to map design and how we put it together. We actually reworked all of our tools for generating worlds to the point where we could import vector data from OpenStreetMap. We wanted the map to be in the same fictional bay location, so we used a city builder game with a mod that could export OpenStreetMap data. We didn't have any assets or anything, we just exported the layout as vectors. So I built a model of the world, planned where everything would be, and then used the vector data to generate the world in a semi-structural way.

When I asked, Faranghe admitted that the game was "Cities": it's Skylines. We had written about such a Skylines map in 2015 (opens in new tab).

"We basically used it as a very user-friendly level editor. If you think about the origins of "SimCity," it was originally a level editing tool that Will Wright came up with to create a helicopter game world. So there is a lot of historical overlap between city building games and level editors. It's kind of a common ancestor."

By the way, that game was Raid on Bungeling Bay, not SimCopter.