One of the most important things I have observed in people who get really good at their field, and especially in an artistic field like level design, is who they compare themselves to.

I’ve spent a lot of time in university CG classrooms with people who don’t generally make contact with the global CG community. These students didn’t hang out on CGTalk or NaliCity of BeyondUnreal. They didn’t make contact with the best in their field. That level of art was simply outside their reality.

As a result, they were satisfied when they did well relative to their local peers. This never got them very far. The truth of the matter was that I never met a single student in any of my classes who I thought was good at any form of CG. They simply never had that motivation to do ten more optimization steps after they had already reached parity with their classmates. It was so sad, because they didn’t lack talent. I hate to see such a waste of potential.

There are two main reasons that this local-exposure-only situation crippled my classmates.

The first is motivation. Creating really kickass art or design is generally not about ‘talent’ or the quality of an idea. These things can be important, but what is also required is an almost obsessively repeated iterative process of optimization. People who do really well at these fields are never satisfied. They always know that they can do better, and they always do. They optimize over and over and over. They look at a piece of work that most would think is complete, and then they go over it a few more times because they understand that there is always room for improvement. My classmates were only trying to beat each other, so they barely got past their first draft.

The second reason why my classmates never got that good is that since they only had contact with others who were similar to themselves, they had a rather narrow and paltry set of inspirations to draw from. Nobody works in a vacuum. In any level, most of the elements will have been executed before by yourself or other designers. Level design, like much art, is largely a matter of recombination of visual and design vocabulary. My student friends were hamstringing themselves and they didn’t even know it, because they were denying themselves access to an incredible array of inspiring work, all of which is available for free on the Net.

Part of the insidiousness of this problem lies in the fact that it is totally silent. It is like a disease that hobbles you, but which somehow prevents you from perceiving the symptoms, since it is based on a lack of knowledge.

(Also note that my classmates had other things against them as well – a faculty-indoctrinated love affair with the vacuous concept of ‘high art’ among them)

Learning a field like level design is, for the first long while, based on a 3-step cycle:

1. Exposure to work done by people better or differently than you.

2. Observation of the differences between that work and your own.

3. Practice executing these differences until they become part of your own vocabulary.

So search out people who are better than yourself. Be competitive (in a friendly way of course). Try to see how you might be able to pull ideas or elements from other designs to improve your own. Understand that not having seen the best work out there is a silent handicap that afflicts all of us to a great degree. If you realize how much you don’t know, you are already at a huge advantage.

Practice doesn’t make perfect. Exposure and practice make perfect.

I made a night version of Europe Sniper. Here’s a screenshot. It’s interesting to compare it to the original.

I noticed an interesting phenomenon when I played the game Planescape: Torment. Around 2005, I decided I had heard enough about what a classic this game was, so I got it and played it. It didn’t work for me. The pacing was slow, it failed to hook me, I was bored. I stopped playing in the first chapter.

At some point this year I happened across the Wikipedia article for Planescape. I read about the universe, the themes, the planes, the Blood War – this entire Planescape mythology. I soon found myself playing Torment again. And it was fun. It went from ‘confusing’ to ‘deep’.

The gameplay had not changed. The only change had been in the context. Every action had a lot more meaning for me. And thus the game became fun – even though it was exactly the same game.

CONTENT VS CONTEXT

We put narratives into games for two main reasons.

The first reason is that the enjoyment we get out of absorbing the story that is fed to us. This happens in all story-based media. What’s special about games, however, is their interactivity. Interactivity means that a storyline needs to fulfill an entirely different purpose, which doesn’t exist in passive media. In a game, a narrative also serves to to create context for, and thus give meaning to, the player’s actions.

This second reason is both more important in gaming, and also poorly understood. We should not be aspiring to beat classical media at pure narrative quality because in this arena we work at a significant disadvantage. We lack an established narrative “appreciation industry” for game stories, and the format inherently destroys the ability to precisely control pacing and tone.

Game narratives should focus on providing an effective, meaningful context for the actions of the player – not the NPCs. The best game narratives aren’t good because they are great stories in a classical sense, but because they enhance the emotional impact of the gameplay so effectively.

MONSTERS WITH MEANING

Take Quake II and the first Half-Life. Fighting a Strogg in Q2 isn’t that different from fighting a bullsquid in HL. Half-Life‘s battles, however, are more emotionally provocative, because Half-Life presents those battles within a much more effective narrative context. Why is Half-Life‘s context more effective?

I don’t personally know anyone who has killed hundreds of alien warriors, alone, on an alien planet, nor have I heard of anyone doing this. Were I asked to imagine myself in this role, I would have difficulty relating to it. It is so far out of normal human experience – it has so little in common to a normal life – that stepping into the role is impossible. Each dead monster, then, represents only a victory over a polygonal enemy in a computer game.

In Half-Life, however, the story is plausible. It is not realistic per se, but the characters are superficially humanlike, and the environments could exist. Gordon Freeman has a name, and interpersonal contact with other friendly humans. It is possible to step into his role and become him because his life makes sense and relates to familiar themes. Killing monsters in Half-Life isn’t just killing monsters; it is participating in mini-stories. I.e. “I quickly blasted that monster with my last few rounds so I could save the scientist in time who was calling for help.”

YOU SOCIAL CLIMBER!

There is strong evidence to show that the main reason human beings have developed exceptional intelligence is not to gain advantage over nature. Many species of animals have been successful for millions of years with very low intelligence. Even tool-using animals like chimpanzees consistently remain at a relatively low intellectual level for aeons.

The reason humans developed intelligence was not to outsmary nature – it was to outsmart other humans. Mostly, this means social competition. The development of language allowed the creation of fantastically complex social strategies for achieving and maintaining social status. This is the root of our superior brain power. The implication is that human intelligence is much more geared towards interpreting and solving social and narrative problems than any other task.

For example, all ancient cultures understood nature by personifying it in spirits or gods. Why is this strange, roundabout way of explaining natural phenomena so universal? Because thinking socially and narratively is most natural for us. Even though social interactions are fantastically complex from an objective standpoint, we still find them easier to decode than abstract problems which are much simpler from an objective standpoint.

The implication for game makers is that we can always count on players to generate stories from the events in a game. Even given a hyper-simple representation of some gameplay, a player will tend to personify the active elements and subconsciously create some sort of narrative. Hence people view moving paddles in PONG as “wanting” to stop the ball, when in fact, they are just abstract data structures being displayed by photons on from a phosphor screen.

This spontaneous narrative generation is far more powerful than the ability of game makers to directly elucidate a narrative. Furthermore, it is mostly subconscious and happens so naturally and effortlessly that players do not even notice it. They simply feel that they are having an emotional experience.

GO EASY ON THAT HARD-WORKING SUBCONSCIOUS

Players will create a story from almost anything, but that doesn’t mean we should make their lives difficult. It helps to give the players a context in which the story is set, so that those spontaneously player-generated stories can use this context as a backdrop.

The most obvious way to do this is to create a backstory from scratch. Creating this sort of story context, however, tends to take a long, long time both for the creator and for the player. The amount of work and exposition requires to create and communicate a completely original universe is almost limitless.

THEFT PAYS

A better solution to this problem is to use some degree of borrowing. Use a story context that your audience already understands.

The most obvious examples of appropriated story context are in licensed products like Star Wars or Star Trek. These universes have expansive and mature mythologies. These are limited, however, because a player will need to be familiar with them for them to have a positive effect on the game.

A second option is borrowing from various “stock contexts”. Whereas damatic writing sometimes uses established “stock characters”, sometimes games borrow from established “stock contexts” which have been established from many previous works. The most obvious stock context is classical high fantasy, in the vein of Lord of the Rings, Warcraft, and Everquest. These products all vary slightly from the high fantasy context, but the common elements are much greater than the differences.

A third option is to use a historical context, like the second world war.

Also very, very effective and underrated is borrowing from real life. Consider the success of The Sims – a game which many people (including myself) thought would die a quiet death, before we realized how important the power of context and player-created narratives are.

EXAMPLE: GTA: SAN ANDREAS

Take an example from GTA: San Andreas. GTA:SA borrows its entire context and feel from the early 90’s West Coast rap scene. Music is borrowed. Stock characters are borrowed. Themes are borrowed. Visuals are borrowed.

It worked fantastically well for these reasons:

-The context is socially acceptable and ‘cool’.
-The context is not already overused by other games.
-The context is immediately comprehensible by GTA:SA‘s target audience. This means much of the contextual groundwork is instantly laid as soon as the theme is advanced.
-The context has a rich mythology of stock characters, stories, and themes to draw from.
-The context is different enough from most people’s real life that it allows players to suspend disbelief even while improbable events are occurring.
-The context is close enough to our real lives that we can identify with the characters and our own role.
-The context make sense as a backdrop for all sorts of conflict, drama, and violence.

All these things come together to provide an excellent basis for subconsciously-player-created narratives.

This idea possibly to be continued in later articles…

‘Thematic consistency’ describes a sense of unity in a piece of art. It is very important in level design.

The worst and most amateurish type of thematic consistency is simple: no thematic consistency. These levels draw visual vocabulary from many different sources and mix them haphazardly. This is common among beginner level designers. These maps are easy to pick out. In order to avoid the no-consistency problem, level designers generally go through a ‘hyper-consistent’ phase where they run to the other end of the spectrum. Instead of everything being chosen randomly, everything looks the same. Take this example: the classic Counter-Strike map de_dust:

Dust’s visual vocabulary is limited to a very small number of design elements. Everything comes from the same narrow band of tan and yellow colors. To make a hyper-consistent level, you simply make sure that every part conforms to your single narrow design theme.

This type of design will not provoke a negative emotional reaction, it will not provoke a positive one either. It lacks the ‘pop’ of really great art. Also note that that it cannot look real, because the real world very rarely conforms to a totally consistent visual theme. There are very few places on Earth, save Antarctica, where everything fits together visually with this level of consistency. Hell, even on Antarctica you will find meteors from time to time.

Obviously hyper-consistency sucks. The solution is to come full circle and start breaking consistency again. There are several ways to do this.

The first way is ‘multi-theming’. This essentially means taking multiple artistic themes, each fully internally consistent, and applying them to different parts of a level. Note that this does not imply mixing the themes at any point. It means that different parts of the level conform to different themes. These different parts can be entire areas, or specific ‘pieces’. So, to make a multi-themed level, you just make sure that every part conforms to one of your narrow design themes.

For example, I was consciously multi-theming when I created DM-Lightfalls and DOM-Aphrodite. In DM-Lightfalls below, I used two themes: the airy verdant jungle, and the blue alien metal. Here they are quite cleanly separated, with a structure of blue alien metal surrounded by a verdant jungle backdrop. There are no parts of the level that do not firmly fit within one or the other theme.

In DOM-Aphrodite, I got more creative. There are three themes: Greek classical stonework, wooden and iron scaffolding, and the same verdant jungle look from DM-Lightfalls. You should be able to see that the elements are mixed more organically than in Lightfalls. Note, however, that there is no single piece that conforms to more than one specific theme. The trees are pure jungle, the statues are pure Greek, and the walkways are pure wood and iron. You don’t see any wooden walkways, for example, with white stone parts.

Multi-theming this way can get you very far, especially with non-realistic themes. Allow me to p1mp myself here and note that I won a very expensive copy of 3dsmax with Lightfalls, and Aphrodite was a finalist in the Make Something Unreal contest. This stuff works.

If you want to do really tight non-realistic maps, however, or just decent realistic ones, you need something else.

What you need goes beyond multi-theming the level. It almost comes full circle, back into thematic inconsistency territory. But instead of being haphazard, this type of inconsistency is interesting while still maintaining an underlying sense of unity.

Organically multi-theming a level requires more than pure visual artistic vision. It requires a narrative context for the level. This means that you need to have thought out the social and physical conditions that created the environment in the first place. If all of the artwork is consistent with this specific narrative, it can be as visually inconsistent as you like on a surface level, but it will still come together as a unified whole.

If you want an example of this, go outside in almost any city. The visual appearance of the landscape is composed of countless different types of visual elements. There will be natural parts in the trees, bushes, and grass. There will be loud, colourful advertisements. There will be people sporting a hundred fashions, and cars in a hundred styles. Even the buildings will have been built over hundreds of years and conform to radically different architectural schools. Furthermore, these elements will be mixed in various frighteningly complex ways: Men and women of several subcultures lounge on stone and wood benches in a grassy park. Beside them is a 100-year-old bronze monument, half-built-over by a modern art nouveau masterpiece.

This stuff doesn’t look good in abstract. It uses every color and every shape. On the surface, there seems to be no consistency. But it all fits into a totally coherent narrative relating to how that city was built.

I present here my finest example of this type of organic multi-theming. You’ll notice many more colors, themes, and elements than Lightfalls or Aphrodite. But it fits together because it has a rational story behind it.

To execute an organically themed level like this, you must make sure every visual element can exist as a natural outgrowth of the narrative context of the level.

We had a big discussion about this article on this BeyondUnreal Forum Thread.

I’m just finishing up my latest baby: Europe Sniper.

I made this level on contract for Close Quarters Combat by Groove Games. Almost all of the assets are there, though there were really very few assets appropriate for a European theme in CQC. I was just getting so damn sick of industrial concrete jungles and sunset or overcast levels that I decided to do someplace where I might actually want to be in real life. Minus the constant gunfire, of course.

The first two shots are panoramas.

I did this sketch last night. Pencil and paper, worked up in Photoshop.

In order to design games, we need to be able to evaluate whether they will be fun or not. Given a description of a game, it is good to be able to know whether it will work before we create it.

This post addresses a common naive method that is often used for evaulating unproduced game designs. It’s something I call mental simulation, and it’s one of the most basic mistakes in game design.

Mental simulation is the process of imagining yourself playing the game in your head, then evaluating the game based on how that imagined play makes you feel. For example, in evaluating a first-person shooter, one would imagine an intense gun battle in which the player is victorious in some particularly hair-raising way.

Game previews and advertisements are designed to make you do mental simulation. They often describe particular gameplay scenarios in poetic detail. The goal is to make you imagine yourself playing the game and enjoying that experience. This is misleading, because the quality of a possible micro-experience in the game says very little about the quality of the game design as a whole.

The main problem is that mental simulation only allows evaluation of a very short snapshot of gameplay. A person will tend to evaluate the coolest possible moment of gameplay imaginable. This means that the rest of the game is being completely ignored. In almost all cases, the imagined experience cannot be extrapolated to the hours and hours of other gameplay. A game needs to be consistently fun across its entire playtime in order to be effective. Thus mental simulation will make games which are only fun for 5% of their length seem really good, even though the other 95% is very boring.

Mental simulation also fails to take into account learning curve. Since the game is in your head, you understand it fully. This is automatic. Unfortunately, there are countless possible game designs which are incredibly good after the player knows how to play the game well. Evaluating games by mental simulation can obscure the difficulty in learning to play the game.

Mental simulation also tends to produce design ideas that lack rigor and internal consistency. Going from mental simulation to code will almost always reveal gaping holes in game logic which cannot be elegantly reconciled.

There are two cognitive biases that lead people to do mental simulation. The first is that human beings respond very well to narratives. Games, however, are not narratives. They are systems from which a narrative can emerge. In evaluating only one possible narrative, we completely miss the quality of the system producing that narrative.

The second bias is the confirmation bias. This is a problem with the way people test hypotheses. Humans will tend to look for evidence which confirms their hypothesis, when in fact, searching for falsification is much more helpful. In this case, a person using mental simulation is looking for “evidence” for confirm their belief that the game in question will be good. They will almost invariably come up with some idealized scenario, and then extrapolate the resulting emotions across the whole game design. This is not useful.

Instead, try to falsify the game design. Don’t try to think of the coolest scenario possible. Try to think of the most boring scenario possible. Usually you will be able to come up with many examples, because most game designs cannot stand up to this sort of attack. If your design can, you know you have a real gem.

It is almost impossible to avoid doing mental simulation. Just understand that will mislead you if you do it naively.

This game is the culmination of years of iteration and refinement on the same basic concept. Most of the core gameplay mechanics go back right to the original 1989 version of SimCity. I expected a high level of polish and approachability from this game. For the most part, my expectations were correct. Continue reading →

I made an interior environment as a project for a Maya class. This was the first major project I made in Maya. I’ve decided to post a full progression of renders of the project so you can see what one of my 3D art pieces looks like as it comes together. Note that there are some places near the end where I could have stopped, but the last few final optimization steps are really what make the whole thing work.

There is usually about 1-2 hours of work between the images.
Continue reading →

Alastair Reynolds’ Chasm City is difficult to categorize. Borrowing elements from film noir, gritty crime novels, and hard-as-rock science fiction and space opera, Reynolds has assembled an idea-rich narrative that will keep any technically and creatively interested reader interested.

Chasm City follows three parallel storylines. The main plot focuses on Tanner Mirabel, stone-cold killer extraordinaire, on a personal quest to exact revenge on the man who killed the woman he loved. At the same time, we follow a flashback plotline of an earlier time in Tanner’s life as he protects his gun-trading boss Cahuella while they hunt hundred-meter-long snakes in an extraterrestrial jungle.

Just to throw another story thread into the mix, Tanner gets indoctrinated early in the book with an engineered virus. The virus is designed to indoctrinate him into a religion based around the worship of Sky Haussmann, the founder of his homeworld. As the book progresses, we follow the Haussmann storyline as it is injected into Tanner’s dreams by the virus, and eventually, into his waking life as well. Continue reading →