GAME DESIGN PART 4: ENVIRONMENT

There’s no doubt that an incredible amount of thought goes into creating environments for video games. The player needs to be able to navigate and perform elaborate actions within the environment, so the environment must be easy to understand, so the player does not get lost, but still give the player a sense of freedom so they don’t get the feeling of mindlessly running through corridors. Although essentially 99.9% of game environments are corridors, they be decorated and tweaked a bit to create any place imaginable. The corridor may have trees in it, making it a jungle, bullet ridden walls in a war torn city or have walls made of carrots in some kind of vegetable based horror game. Different developers have pretty varied levels of skill in creating environments, in some games, the sense of “corridoring” is blatantly obvious, making the player feel too constrained and claustrophobic, I found this most notable in Treyarchs attempts at the call of duty franchise. Where every level just consisted of ten minute corridor sections, strewn with objects placed so obviously it may have well had a sign on saying:(this is really great cover for taking on the snipers nest which is coincidentally without any cover at all) so the feeling of the chaos of battle was utterly destroyed, making it seem as though the fight had been pre-arranged by both sides so nobody would be too protected, or have to excitedly run too far until they came across a perfectly placed, super-bomb-proof pile of rubble. Even in Gears of War, which is a game I love, but admittedly is full of level design clichés just stuck together by duct tape, I’m a big fan of the cover mechanics, but it then causes the level designers to constantly have to come up with reasons why there 70x200cm blocks of impenetrable material everywhere, so huge blocks of broken buildings, wood and chunks of metal lie perfectly parallel all over the levels, making them feel more like paint ball firing ranges, than destroyed cities.Last year I bought Valve’s orange box, containing Half Life 2, it’s two episodes, Team Fortress 2 and Portal. Apart from the awesome games it contained, the most interesting things were the developer commentaries which could be listened to whilst playing through the levels. The vast majority of them discussed the environments themselves as it became clear that the biggest struggle the developers were having was trying to implement their great ideas, but then having to constantly micro adjusting every single aspect until they would work and still be noticeable to even the most vacant of players. Which for the most part were thought out and implemented very well, but occasionally the ideas had been diluted so much that they fell apart and were removed entirely.

There are a few ways that a developer can approach designing a level, sometimes the developer can instantly go into boxing out a level, to create interesting areas and obstacles for the player to move around in, or they can take real life environments and just recreate them as accurately as possible. but both of these can have drawbacks, as the level that was just designed for player movement, and was just decorated to look like say an Italian renaissance street, it will most likely be unbelievable, and seam to disjointed. And then if the developers just recreate

existing streets, they may for not be easily negotiated or understood by the player. For the best designed levels, developers research real life environments, then by taking existing features, use these as inspiration and building blocks for interestingly laid out levels. In Assassin’s Creed, where historic cities were heavily researched, but when they were built in-game, the designers took some subtle artistic licence to make the environments more playable, by making back streets wider to stop the player from getting lost, and main streets narrower so the payer could believably leap over them.

GAME DESIGN PART 3: CHARACTER

I’ve recently started watching the HBO drama “The Wire”. It’s incredible, But it took four episodes until I could even explain why it was any good. It was the realism, in not referring to the authentic gang language, or the heavily researched police practice, as it was written by a former police reporter, so that was all there, it was the characters. The characters behaviour and responses to situations were believable. The suspension of disbelief is so important in any story, but it can be so easily ruined. When the focus is on everything else being hyper realistic, but the characters. Say for example if somebody creates a film about the epic battle of Stalingrad, using special effects to accurately depict the destroyed city, and authentic clothing weapons and equipment are used, the entire production would be pointless if a character’s behaviours an reactions don’t reflect the intense and doomed plight of the 6th army. So he might as well be wearing a Hawaiian shirt and carrying a lazer gun, running around Loughborough. Or for another example, with the early series of csi, (at the point where the technology being used to solve cases was still reasonably believable, and the depleted uranium powered, genetic laser scanning hyper computer hadn’t been used to analyse a dodgy stain on a pair of boxer shorts yet.) The story was still entirely unbelievable because the characters where constantly trying to hard look cool and sexy, even wearing their designer sunglasses and spurting out unbearably corny one liners at three in the morning, whilst probing a pile of guts they’d found in a dust bin. I think too much focus is also put onto solely appearances of character to create plausibility, as many times characters personalities are matched with visual clichés, where the clever but socially awkward computer guy will wear ill-fitting jeans his mum bought him and have a serious sight problem, and the wise character has to have a beard and stare randomly into the distance, when delivering any of their lines. And yet another example of horrendous characters is Roland Emmerich‘s film “2012”, it’s about as enjoyable as finding an unexpected lump in your scrotum, even the massive explosions are ruined when the protagonist’s only reaction to witnessing an entire city set on fire and fall into the sea, is raising his eye brows and exclaiming “oh god” plunging the already bad film into just a three hour long sequence of vaguely connected explosions. But that was bound to happen with the film, when the studio’s focus was on just bucks and not brains. So like with “The Wire”, which is completely at the other end of the spectrum the series had to be produced and written intelligently, as it would have nothing to stand on. It’s clearly, in part due to the fantastic actors cast in the wire, that the characters are so good, but more than ever before I notice the incredible importance of the fantastic writing. As before if I saw a character do something clearly out of character, I’d blame the actor, but ultimately it’s both the script and the actors which have to work seamlessly with each other to create a believable and enjoyable experience. This is easy to say, and relatively easy to achieve when making a film with a bit of thinking involved, but with video games there’s quite a mountain to climb. As in scripted cut scenes or portions where the player is held by the hand, the game developer can retain the players suspension of disbelief by controlling the players actions, so npc’s reactions are believable, but problems arose when the payer is given too much freedom, and either the game just doesn’t react to the player, or hundreds of branching reactions needing to be created, the former is clearly the easiest, and most frequently used, I admit I’ve probably spent way too long in games shooting innocent characters and generally acting like an arsehole just to piss off the npc’s, but to no avail. But when I even a relatively believable reaction happens from an npc, in say a game like mass effects, I start getting pretty excited. I’m confident that video games are currently the right track for making more engaging stories and characters, and with advanced mocap in games like Enslaved now LA Noire were getting to see how the tech in games can improve characters, and not just cover them up with yet more advanced explosions.

MY IDEAS ABOUT OTHER PEOPLE'S IDEAS ON IDEAS IN GENERAL

“The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.” Albert Einstein, date

No idea is divine, it will always have been formed from many external ideas, our minds need input to create any output at all, so whether consciously or unconsciously, were constantly dipping into our own mental bank of information. Like with literature and music, art and design frequently shares ideas to propagate development of new ideas to move the industry forward, but this sharing of ideas can come in different forms. There’s healthy, occasional exchanging of ideas in the form of inspiration, and then there’s the blatant exchange of entire design concepts, effectively creating a closed loop, or in another terms, design incest. Where good ideas go to die, and crap ones are born.

I’m all for any industry sharing ideas for inspiration, but when this force becomes destructive, its no longer viable and Industry clearly needs to start looking outwards. Industries should look outward for inspiration to prevent ideas current ideas to dilute and die and for new ideas to come in. A clear example of the closed loop of creativity can be found in the automotive world, with ex BMW design head, Chris bangle’s revolutionary Flame surfacing “design language”, which was inspired by the postmodern architectural movement of Deconstructivism, applied by much of Frank Giery’s work. The flame surfacing first appeared in the x coupe concept, which later evolved into the first generation z4, the car was very forward thinking, and it caused a great ripple in the car design world. It was beautiful car which was unmistakably modern because of it’s fresh and original styling, but It has now been taken as inspiration for so many cars from different manufacturers since, but few executed it successfully, as the original design’s basis was lost in translation, and its just became a design gimmick, carelessly applied to countless middle of the road concept cars, just built to fill car sized gaps in motor shows ever since.

This isn’t just happening in the car design world, its been happening in the entire creative industry since the dawn of time, but it worries me how frequently it happens in video games. Where still a young industry, so we shouldn’t have this sense of, “oh, everything new has been done”. So we might as well just tread water like the rest of the world. The forward motion of the games industry is pretty relentless, but for crying out loud it’s slow. Last year millions of gamers went utterly mental about Limbo, which could be mistaken as Mario played by a suicidal child on an old tv, but don’t get me wrong though, I thought it looked great and had an awesome atmosphere, but I think it was still a bit of a baby step in comparison to the way it was portrayed as the best invention since penicillin. I shouldn’t really give it a tough time because it was an indie developer, and at the moment there clearly the market leaders in new ideas, just unfortunately not the actual market leaders.

GAME DESIGN PART 2: ART DIRECTION

In a Games developer, the art director is the most senior member of the Art team. He is responsible for the overall aesthetic of the game, this encompasses every artistic decision which is made during the games production. What colour pallets will the assets, characters or levels have, what art style the graphic design and UI design should take and even down to minor technical decisions like are these goblins’ legs to short?. The art director works meticulously with the game design team as all assets must be coherent to the games setting and story, the player needs to be able to recognize what certain objects are, and what they do, and also to be on hand to edit or create new assets for testing new ideas on the fly. I defiantly see the art directors role as a creative one, as his ideas form the basis of the game’s entire appearance, and his job, although senior is not overly bogged down with technicalities and admin tasks. Whereas the Lead artist would be dealing with the technical side of the game’s Art and primarily trying to make the art department be as productive as possible, such as creating texture and modelling budgets, technical specs for assets and planning the workflows/processes for creating in-game assets. The lead artist also converses with leads from other departments, such as programming to discuss complications with inputting assets into the game.

The Art Director/ Lead relationship is similar to the relationship between a Director and a Producer in film production, where the director is the creative force behind the film, and the producer “makes it happen” by overseeing the project and managing major aspects of the films production. Although The roles of art directors and leads in the film industry differs quite significantly to the game industry, in the games in terms of art, the director is top dog, whereas in film the art director is 2^nd in command to the production designer. The roles are effectively re-named as the Game’s lead artist has a similar job description to the film industry’s art director, as his role is much more managerial, involving administrative tasks and coordinating the art department, along with a designated Art department Coordinator. Also the production designer’s role of being the overall artistic visionary for the film is comparable to that of the game industry’s Art directors’.

For me to become an art director in the future I think I’m going to need to broaden my sources of inspiration, and also my knowledge of different design principles. I have interests in architecture, fine art, product, and automotive design, which may be very useful, but still I think they need broadening, or at least I need to get into the habit of researching and collecting reference for subjects I’m not accustomed to. As a successful art director would have be able to bend and stretch their own specializations to be able to coherently envision an entire universe for a video game. I’m aware design and concepting tasks are handed out to teams of artists, so content can be designed efficiently, but the art director needs to competently oversee all aspects of the design, for example having to make decisions regarding design styles of buildings, to patterns printed on an npc’s socks, where one is clearly more important, but both need competent consideration.

Last November we were set a project in visual design where we were asked to sketch the landscape of Bradgate park. After a day of sketching there I didn’t feel as if I’d produced enough work to develop a final piece, so I decided to visit again. I arrived at around half 9 on an incredibly foggy day, I assumed the fog would clear by midday like it had the previous day, but I was incorrect. I was initially pretty peeved about the conditions, as it made sketching the open landscape impossible, but as I wandered around the park I realized the remarkable of the situation. I had visited Bradgate park many times before, as I live locally to it. I’d seen it in thick snow, bright midsummers and bronze autumns, but I had never seen it this stunning, the thick fog reduced visibility to about 75 meters, but was surprisingly bright, as the fog was hugging the ground at a thickness of only about 10. I continued to sketch and paint, but I felt to photos would document the atmosphere much better, so with my compact digital camera I began snappin’ away. I took over 200 photos, so here’s just some of the best ones.

© Robin Smith, November 2010