A local gamer is looking to build the City of Grande Prairie piece by piece and pixel by pixel.
Inspired by an Edmonton man looking to recreate the capital city’s downtown region, Tyler Barr started plucking away at building the Swan City in the game City Skylines about six months ago. He says, as the project began to grow in size, he found himself more and more invested.
“I’ve always been a fan of the city simulator genre, and it’s like ‘hey, I’ve got a city I can recreate”, so I just decided to do it.”
“Last week I had a bit of extra time to work on it, so I put the pedal to the metal and re-did the entire downtown area, the older part of the city,” he adds.
He says while working on the downtown core, he has been able to also see the game come to life in an oddly specific way as it becomes more and more of a fully functional simulation of the city.
“One thing I’ve noticed is the traffic flows similarly to the way it flows in real life,” he laughs. “It’s very stop and go, which I found fascinating,” he adds.
Barr says, while he considered civil engineering as his major in college, it’s not his real-life forte, as he plans to go into academics. He adds he will be releasing photos of the finished products online when it’s complete.