Once you
are comfortable with the advanced level of editing available in
a package like MAX, I recommend getting your hands as messy as possible
with your main terrain geometry. Don’t rely on a fractal seed to
generate your whole level – instead refer to directly to real-world
terrain as much as possible, through photographs, drawings, and
personal visits to geographically interesting areas. We had some
success on Trespasser by starting with a large clay model of the
entire island locale of the game, sculpted by our lead artist and
then laser-scanned. Although much of the detail of the sculpture
was lost once the scanned mesh was reduced to usable polycounts,
it at least gave us a set of existing and fairly believable natural
features to work around. This gave some much-needed direction to
the design process (both visual and gameplay – the topic of the
next installment).
I cannot
recommend highly enough studying as much real-world geometry as
possible. Real terrain slopes and rolls in ways that simply will
not occur to most level designers working with no reference. After
you work on outdoor levels while studying the real world for a few
years, you may find yourself getting fascinated and excited by seemingly
simple things like how a rock face and the side of a hill connect.
When you start to become wistful about natural features that you
can’t reproduce well enough with today’s technology, you’ll really
be able to call yourself an outdoor level designer.
My words
of advice, which may become fairly irrelevant over the next year
or two, are for people making outdoor levels in indoor engines.
The key to a realistic outdoor area really is the long vista. To
avoid feeling like you are in a bowl or a maze of canyons, there
must be spots within a level where the player feels like they can
see all the way to the horizon, or can look out across other parts
of the level. Creating a vista that doesn’t drag the framerate
down requires careful planning however.
One approach
is to use fakery – create a very low detail area, such as a distant
river valley, perhaps which the player can not otherwise reach,
and allow them to see into it from selected points on the player’s
path. Use geometry for the vista, however, because a mere painting
of a distant river valley will almost inevitably be at the wrong
resolution, and will seem obviously flat. For this reason, in fact,
geometry in a skybox in Unreal, for instance, is not ideal, because
the camera into the skybox is fixed, which almost eliminates a feeling
or perspective, although you will get a good parallax effect between
your skybox contents and your in-level geometry.
If you do
not use fake forced-perspective vistas, then you need to be extremely
careful what parts of the level you allow the player to look across.
Conceal as many high-detail areas as possible – your staircases
(natural or human-made), cave/building entrances, platforms for
jumping puzzles, etc. If you know exactly the angles your player
will look across the level, you can use mid-sized hills to block
off the complicated stuff and they’ll even add interest to the area.
If you construct them carefully to be as small as possible, they
won’t seem like canyon walls when the player walks past their base,
even though they are serving the same purpose.
Finally,
know your engine’s strengths and limitations. Some indoor engines
just cannot handle large levels with lots of geometry and actors
and textures even if you can never see them. You may want to create
a single, large base terrain for your entire level, and split it
up into a variety of smaller actual levels, connected by tunnels
and tight canyons where you can put loading points. If you allow
the player to look across a location that is technically in another
level, just ensure that its major features (textures, trees) are
identical or at least very similar to the ones the player passed
through from ground level. This will maintain the player’s belief
that they are passing through one continuous space, even though
they are passing through load points.
There is
much, much more to say about geometry building in the outdoors,
but hopefully what I’ve covered so far is enough to get beginners
started and give experienced outdoor level designers some inspiration
and ideas to consider. Perhaps someday in the future when I’ve
managed to work on an outdoor game which is neither cancelled nor
a failure, I can return to the topic in some other forum besides
Beaker’s Bent, but it’s time to take this column back towards its
more-standard topic, game design.
So next
column, in the final installment of Making the Outdoors, I’ll be
tackling the big, hairy issue of design in realistic outdoor spaces.
There will hopefully be no two-month delay this time!
- Richard
Beaker Wyckoff is a game designer, not a level designer,
damnit