CREDIT: COLOSSAL ORDER LTD.
London's Thames River in all its digital glory, created by Fanshawe alumna Khalid Sleiman for PC video game Cities: Skylines

There’s a new plot of land for people playing the recently released city-building simulator PC game Cities: Skylines: London, Ont.

Created by Fanshawe College alumna Khalid Sleiman, who graduated from the three-year graphic design program in April 2013, the plot of land features the Thames River, major ponds such as Pond Mills, Boler Mountain, highways, plane routes, railroads, bridges and wooded areas.

The goal of the game is to build working cities by being in charge of zoning, road placement, public services and taxation. Players also have to maintain the city’s budget; population health and happiness; employment; traffic flow; air, water and noise pollution; and other factors.

The game comes with a map editor, which Sleiman, who is a Web developer and graphic designer at Campus Creative, used to create London.

“I was looking through the workshop where all the maps are, and I noticed there was one for Toronto and there was one for Grimsby, Ontario, I think, and so I decided and went out and make one of London,” he said.

He didn’t know how many people from London played the game, but he had spare time and wanted to try the map editor.

He found a heightmap of London on the Internet and built the plot of land based off of it.

He created a first version of the map but had some issues – the flow of the Thames wasn’t strong enough.

London has different elevation points, Sleiman explained, and while the river would flow properly in one area, it would overflow in another.

“I had a really tough time with making the water right,” he said.

One comment on the Reddit page of the map says that by the time the city reached a population 5,000, people were drinking sewage water.

“So accurate Thames,” the person joked.

Sleiman fixed the issues and released a second version of the map. As of March 25, about 600 people have downloaded the map, he said.

Cities: Skylines was developed by Finnish developer Colossal Order and released on March 10 for Windows, OS X and Linux. The game sold 250,000 copies in the first 24 hours, according to IGN, and hold a Metacritic score of 86.