The Architect Who Built CityVille

In Yick Kai Chan's first 12 years as a professional architect, government regulations and the laws of physics bound what he could build. No more: Chan is the man who designs all the buildings in Zynga's game CityVille, played by millions of Facebook users around the world, for which he creates factories, stadiums, re-creations of the Empire State Building and whatever else the digital universe demands.

Yick Kai Chan, CityVille architect

Talk about your architectural background, and how you came to be designing virtual buildings for games.

When I was a kid I really loved to draw. I started drawing when I was 2 years old. When I went to school, I took architecture because it was one of the majors I could pick to utilize my drawing skill and passion, and also build something. I graduated and worked as an architect for 12 years.

Typically, in an architecture firm, there are two types of architects. One is called the design architect; the other is the production architect. Usually a firm has very few design architects who purely just design buildings. I've always been on the design side.

In the end of 2008, just because the economy went bad, the whole architecture field died down. So I thought, "Maybe it's time to step away and try to do something else." But I wanted something where I could continue to be creative. So I looked to digital or concept art as the next logical step. I put my proposal out, and [it ended up being] a perfect fit at Zynga. Zynga back then was starting to do CityVille, and they needed somebody who had drawing skill and an architectural background to be their designer. I loved what they did, and it seems they loved my background.

That's wild that the recession spurred such a jump in your career.

When the field is [in trouble], you've got to find something to survive. But I didn't want just a different job. I wanted to continue pursuing my passion, [and] I decided I wanted to do things a little more creatively. In architecture, there are all these limits on how you can design buildings because of the physics… or the government regulations. The way to [get around that] was in the digital world—there's no limitation to where the design can go. I thought it would be really cool to jump into this field.

So in CityVille, you're not bound by the rules of science or by the rules of government?

[Laughs] Well, the buildings won't get built physically, but they have to look believable.

How much planning must go into a digital building?

If you take out the government regulations and the physics, it's actually not much different from how you design a real building. I need to come up with ideas for what the building looks like, how it functions—all that has to look believable. So there's a lot of architecture that goes into the design.

Do you blueprint them out?

I will be given a list of buildings that will be needed in the game. Then I need to do a reference search on those kinds of buildings and get a bunch of ideas together to sketch out what the buildings might look like. Once I have that rough sketch, then I start detailing them with colors, materials, lights and shadows so our 3D team can take my concept and make it into a 3D model.

How many different buildings have you created?

Every building is unique. Every building is different. I would say I've done about 1000, including approved and unapproved designs—I'm not saying there are 1000 buildings in the game now. But I've done tons and tons of buildings.

What have you done with CityVille buildings that you couldn't do in real life?

Stadiums and super-high-sky-rises. Those are the kinds of buildings that excite me.

Anything else particularly cool you've done for the game?

We just put in a factory. To me, that's really cool; maybe I would never get the chance to design a factory in the real world.

[Around] Chinese New Year time we put in a lot of Chinese New Year stuff—like those Chinese houses or Chinese tent-pole types of buildings. Those are very special to me. We just launched Little Italy. It includes a gelato shop, a pizza shop, an Italian cooking school, a cheese shop and a lot of brownstone-type residential buildings. Once we got that task, I started to search for references, and went to Google and searched for Little Italy to see how the overall aesthetics would look. From that, we'll pin down a few aesthetic clues. One would be the color: Little Italy is very colorful in how it uses the flat colors: the green, the white and the red. A lot of times, they paint it on the building or use these colors on the awnings. And there's a used look to it: People are really living there. So the props and a lot of the little things we put into the design would try to reflect that. The building has to look a little bit more burnt, or dirty. We'll have stuff in the balcony, flags that hang out from windows. Also, in Little Italy, a lot of shops are built into mixed-use buildings, meaning you have people living on upper floors and maybe on the ground floor could be a retail shop. So the pizzeria, for example, would take that design language.

Is there a particular look, or architectural style, that drive how you want CityVille to look overall?

We are trying to see cuteness and realism together. The game absolutely has to look fun to all our players. That's a top priority of my design. So some of the details have to be exaggerated to make the buildings look cute. But on top of that, to make the buildings believable, some real elements have to be in them.

If we do anything tall, we have to squeeze the building down to keep the sense of cuteness. It could be exterior lighting—I'll make it extra big. We have a particular scale for floor proportions when we're stacking things together, so there are certain rules I have to follow. Maybe the second or third floor has to be squeezed down.

In terms of style, the game is international, so every design has to appeal not just to a single group. So the design is international.

Do you play?

Yes.

Did you do anything special for your own house or buildings?

[Laughs] No, what I have is what everybody else has in the game. I don't have anything special.