mozidesign.com Unorganized Thoughts of a Game Designer

Making of WAR-CBP3-Meditation: A Study of Simplicity

So today the winners of the second phase of the Make Something Unreal Contest were announced and this time around I was lucky enough to snag 3rd place in the Best Warfare Category.  For more details and listing of the other winners follow the link, and before I begin with my discussion, I would like send my congrats out to all the winners, finalists and honorable mentions that were announced during phase 2.  Some really good competition this time around.

Without further delay let’s begin this discussion of simplicity, and what better way to start it off than a quote.  “Things should be made as simple as possible, but not any simpler.  ” Einstein, Albert. I first heard of this quote from my days of working on Spider-Man 3 DS as our lead designer had this quote printed and posted at his desk.  After knowing about this I have always thought about simplicity in my designs both at work and my mod projects. However, one thing to keep in mind, is that simplicity should not sacrifice the presentation or overall quality of whatever it is one may be doing.  When that happens, it’s not simplicity, its half assing everything.

But how does this relate to level design you ask? Well this is just my opinion and feel free to disagree, but in terms of level design I think simplicity can deliver effective results in the flow of the map. If the flow is simple and effective it promotes an easy to learn layout. If the layout is easy to learn it becomes memorable. If it becomes memorable it can be mastered to level of predictability to help you have that sixth sense of what your teammates or opponents may do in game.  Simplicity can also be adapted to visuals (i.e. Team Fortress 2) or even systems (don’t have a good example right now, but I am sure there is one) Now that I have established my thoughts on ’simplicity’ it’s time to move on to how this was applied to my level.  I’ll do my best not to bog you down with a lot of reading and let the pictures do all the talking! The level began with a very basic shell:

In the screens above I mapped out my initial flow with the terrain editor to create an ‘S’ shaped layout. Once I was happy with layout of the terrain I setup some really bare bone BSP blocks to add as structures to get an overall feel of how the arena plays. I did many iterations on the terrain until it felt right before moving on to the next steps of making the level look pretty.

One key thing to note here is that simplicity lies in the layout as I mentioned above, I choose a common shape that most people are already familiar with and works well for symmetrical gameplay.  Even in a bare bones state the map felt fun from the get go, and was easy to remember all the paths and key landmark locations that would be vital during a frantic game of Warfare. After deciding that the layout was locked down and simple enough for a good game of Warfare I moved on to visual polish. (I wish I had more screens handy from the dev time of the map but these show case how the layout came to life)

As I mentioned above simplicity can also be applied to visuals and I did just that in this map. It’s obvious to see that things are not over complicated as seen other UT 3 maps rather, they feel natural, as if they belong in the environment.  This simplicity in visuals also supports the gameplay in the fact that they don’t distract the player from what’s important… the game! With this in mind I built key land marks such as the arched bridge in the screen above is near the base exits. The construction of this landmark is rather simple but what does to support gameplay is that at this landmark players know that they near their own base or the enemy base (red or blue respectively) There are many more examples of this in the map that I could go on about, but hopefully when you play it you will keep this discussion in the back of your mind.

Next up was more visual polish which finally lead to completed design seen on my level design page and in the screen below:

So to put everything into a retrospective I would like to share some in editor screens to drive home the concept of simplicity I used when creating the map. Though I would like to point out that I made clever use of a total of 2506 meshes and a few BSP cubes!

Unlit/No Meshes:

From the screen below you can see that the initial BSP cubes I had in the first screens are exactly the same but textured ( again I used a generic base stone texture, simplicity!) This is the core layout and what I think makes the map fun to play. The meshes and lighting are there as necessary polish items to make the map cool but even without those the simplicity and refinement of the layout on it’s own could do quite well.

Unlit w/Mesh Work

Oh look pretty visuals! All I did here was use the static mesh library in game to morph those BSP cubes into believeable structures without compromising my intial gameplay designs

Lit w/Mesh Work

So here it is the final product in the editor!

Hopefully, this post was informative and helpful to you especially those of you that do mod work out there in the community. However, I would like to state one thing before I close this discussion. In no way I am docking down mind bending visuals and crazy (but awesome) map layouts, what some of you level designers out there achieve is spectacular and I applaud your work.  Just take this post as alternative way of thinking if you get stuck or get designer’s block… think of the simplest answer to your problem it may just work.

Thanks for reading, if you got a copy of UT 3 please check out WAR-Meditation (available on level design page) hopefully you will have fun!