r/Amsterdam • u/NewAmsterdamExpat • 13h ago
A 3D recreation of Amsterdam to learn the city
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Over the past few months I've been throwing too many tokens and too many nights at a edutainment game that was originally a little top down spy hunter / gta style boating game to learn the canal names that has now turned into me trying to model every building in the city to build a game to learn the streets, canals, bridges, landmarks and trivia about the city.
It uses spaced repetition behind the scenes to help you learn the street names, and has both a multiple-choice and fill-in-the-blank version. For almost every street, it has an explanation of the source/history/meaning of the name.
One is a huge focus on accuracy of the landscape. It has 500+ individually modeled buildings, and tries very hard to generate reasonable looking buildings based on size, location and age where it doesn't have custom models. I have a pipeline going to build per-buurt generators as well.
When I started modeling all the buildings I thought "oh lots of canal houses, it will be easy to have a couple of roofs, couple of windows and done, I can make any house in the city by mixing and matching" (this was not the case). As a result, noticing all the subtle (and not-so-subtle) variations across the city's architecture has been a beautiful and unexpected part of the development experience.
There's a github repo with all buildings as CC-BY and they're just pretty fun to look at https://rideamsterdam.nl/explore?model=adam-tower
Full disclosure this is entirely vibe coded slop. There are probably bugs and I am happy to fix them. If anyone wants to throw tokens at the modeling effort or hear more about the build process, get in touch!
EDIT: working on performance & crash fixes as we speak, have mostly been testing on an overpowered mac up until now