Inside Star Citizen: How We Work - Level Design

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:00

   inside Star Citizen is many different things to many different people but at the center of it all is our desire to educate about the very nature of game development itself and in this week's part two of our three-part experimentation and format we lean into that aspect and explore some of the foundational philosophies that guide just one of the teams that are continuously working to iterate and improve on the persistent universe as It prepares to grow in this year's upcoming Alpha 4.0 now where last week we met the team this week it's how we work level design with the folks from the Frankfurt level design [Music] team a level design it's probably one of

2. 00:00:58

   the hardest things to describe in game development we take gameplay elements and we take the environment and we just bring all that together it is more than the sum of all of its pieces you can't just kind of speed level design a forest Log Cabin that that's not enough like what is a player doing that what does it mean why does this thing exist in this space what can the player do as well you've got the environment art that makes the art itself this is not us we have the gameplay teams that make all the gameplay elements and this is not us what we do is we take these two things we combine them together and make it cohesive environment for you guys we design the space itself and we also accommodate that everything that

3. 00:01:45

   goes inside of it a lot of the things that you use like hangers ATC I hate to say transit systems elevator rides wait you're responsible for the elevators elevators are our problem yeah no we just just a setup s sleep if you die in the elevator that's actually a problem from recording side we just spring them under the bus is it possible in a Sandbox game to have level design yes cuz you have to consider all of the individual constituent pieces and why they need to exist together you can throw anything in there but you have to account for like does this begin to break the game so you you have conversations with economy you have conversations with code you have

4. 00:02:32

   conversations with system design Mission design and you have to figure out how all these pieces again stitch together so there are six principle for good level design uh first is readability this basically means Clarity in your environment you're got to make sure within your layouts that everybody can understand where they need to go what they need to do all the affordances need to make sense the typical one could be I've got a door in front of to me how do you describe a locked door from an unlocked door for example you you're fighting an AI and they can read easily the elements the gameplay elements you need to understand your cover space you need to find the AI within the space if the AI is in a black area you will not see it at all and this is very important for us we really focus on this kind of

5. 00:03:20

   stuff and we make sure that anything you interact with in within the environment you can see as clear as possible next is flow and leading lines it's a it's creating a a good composition uh of all these things from layout lighting some props good mix of combat spaces or like combat encounters and then time for exploration and then doing a mix between both we make sure that you're not going always on a straight line we make sure that you're not spending 2 hours walking from one space to the other in pyro you'll come across a lot more players as we funnel them into a certain space with with a concentration of missions for example or things to do you know that is flow to us on the flow level that is higher on the chart and then certain areas will be a bit more on the lower end of your of

6. 00:04:09

   your pacing leading lines is a compositional technique some examples can be you are following the cables from one interactable through to another arrow to interact with another element you're being breaded along you're being led along these leading lines with the Pyro station you have the core element you have the arms pointing towards the Center is a very simple example but more in the larger scale but we look at it also in on a room basis we're trying to direct you through to a discoverable place over here or trying to direct you to through to like a event we're using light and cables to navigate you through these spaces third is options we want to give you guys multiple options so you can complete your objective the way you want it in context of our game is giving the

7. 00:04:57

   player the opportunity to approach certain situations in different ways or get an idea of the situation in the first place you have straightforward options the combat route you have a more sneaky option for players that don't like to engage in combat so much or you can also have like a puzzle route for players that like to do more interesting uh environment interactions then there is clustering clustering is also falls into the compositional techniques or more in the layout side of things clustering means that you start like bringing objects together to create something a bit more natural you put importance on things by grouping certain things up into clusters specific power example would be the outposts where you have a big L imp path in the center and then you have groups

8. 00:05:45

   of clusters of buildings that that are arranged around it and they form like points of interest by themselves we've not always been successful with clustering but moving forward into the future especially with Pym we're taking a renewed effort to concentrate creating cluster things properly finally there's scale and proportion scale is important in how you vary it if everything is large for example nothing is large anymore we are the one that defines all the metrics for FPS but also for ships we're talking about ships that have a few meters to some ships that have hundreds of meters and we need to make sure that the transition from A to B feels always smooth and natural right if you for example come from a maintenance Corridor a small little peack vent and expose

9. 00:06:33

   yourself to this big room you know you'll get it more likely in AA moment so we still have a very big Open Spaces but con condense the game playay Space a bit more so the players don't have so much options to walk around but still get like the the sense and the immersion of like a big open space proportion is just also feeds into into scale so you can use proportions to be able to scale up like what is kind of the background space what is the foreground space and what is the mid-ground space of like what is immediately interesting to you as a player and what is in the background that's not yet relevant to you so you can land at one outpost on pyro 2 and you can see yourself in a sort of like habitation Outpost Village down the hill you can see there's a Refinery area but the main feature of this place that you were drawn to

10. 00:07:21

    initially was this massive mining Tower these become like your immediate foreground your midr and your background but again you can always come into your share and go to this mive maning Tower therefore this becomes the new foreground you're always orbiting it you're transferring around this becomes your Landmark to orientate yourself around all these other spaces nearby traditionally in level design you start out with a pre-production phase this is where we ideate conceptualize We Gather references we do sketches we do top- down layouts of of our brain map put things together we then go into white box which is literally going into the editer mocking things up in 3D making creating the space and defining where the gameplay elements are we have a shop on the right shop on the left uh

11. 00:08:08

    your uh elevator Transit over here we work at different scales at this point and we define basically everything in the location but with very very basic shapes and then we hand it over to Art so the focus lies more on art for gray boxing making things more pretty with us still having an eye on it so see that the original concept is still intact and then finally we'll move into final art and the level designers will be able to kind of keep all of these locations like the intent of the location is kept consistent it doesn't Veer off too much into some is too big or too small this is the original design direction that we wanted from beginning through to end once the location is released it's not finished for us because there's always maintenance and additions that we do when there's a new functionality a new gameplay coming in uh we go in and we add them to all the location we retrofit

12. 00:08:56

    the locations so whenever there is a bug in the Pu we have have to maintain these locations so we would go into uh new babage and fix uh AI placements or shops not working anymore but mostly uh level design is also about coordinating with every team so be with like lightings mission team environment art audio narrative they work more or less in like in their pockets and then we try to keep an eye on like the big picture to bring everything together and look that everything is coherent and cohesive what is important to us um or what we really want you to experience is is a nicer flow in the stations I think what we realize with Stanton um is you know you just take a ton of elevators from place to place kind of want to optimize

13. 00:09:44

    that for you uh make it a bit more efficient so you don't spend a lot of time going from A to B we are trying to bring for example the clinic and the habitation right away into the shopping area and trying to make it much more compact that's same time we really really want to offer some good gameplay content within the stations outside of missions that you can go into and discover on your own as you explore we try to improve pyro stations with all the lessons we've got from Stanton and now for outposts each location has to have its own identity like does this Outpost fulfill the need for a combat space does this Outpost fulfill the need for like a social space this is Outpost fulfill the need for like a puzzle space all these factors come into play and come to consideration when creating a whole new location we

14. 00:10:32

    want you to be able to discover little points of interest Around The Outpost kind of feathered if you come across an outpost there there will be multiple Sub locations around it these could be like Villages around it this could be deric settlements that you that are abandoned and you have to go into and can find potentially loot in and once you've landed your ship you are no more than a short walk away from the main reason you've arrived at this Outpost which is to trade we want to encourage you to ground vehicles to be able to pick up your cargo that You' bought from those Place load up your little Drake mule drive it over to your ship load that ship and then fly out with your goods we wanted to create a location that felt real so you had the logistic is there the AI created roads between the different points of interest within the Outpost so that it feels logical for a

15. 00:11:20

    player to walk in or to Traverse pyro is always dangerous so any social space can turn into a combat scenario so you need to be able to duck into cover at a moment noticed even when you're doing um nice easy trade and socials so we have to provide you with opportunities for cover and exciting FPS combat scenarios there's a lot of things to consider for an open world game that on this scale you have to account for multiple you know situations and have players also be able to deal with all kinds of circumstances so it is a complex undertaking it's a challenging one but this is what we want to account for in pyro as much as we can level design metas always important because we think of a very broad scale and try to craft and create a great experience for you as the player level

16. 00:12:10

    design ends up being greater than the sum of all of its parts I get to talk with all these different disciplines at C but also get to kind of like hold the hand of the player and curate that all the way through we focus on the player experience we look at all the features that exist and we try to bring them up all together into a cohesive environment that feels really fun for the players do you always succeed no but it's not always like within our hands but we always try our best to within the framework we have um to create like the best possible experience for you guys so we've learned a lot from our time in Stanton and we love hearing all the feedback we get from you as players we want to take the all on board and begin establishing ourselves forward when we come into pyro what we really want to do also is balance out game play with the visuals I mean in the past we've seen a

17. 00:13:00

    lot of focus being spent on the visuals and less so on the content this needs to switch around and find an even plane and level design is just one way we're doing this in pyro we as level designers really want to make pyro and stand in the future a great experience for the players from a flow perspective boring you less making things more efficient for you as You Follow the gameplay Loops that you want to follow and offer you gameplay content that you can just discover on your own so what we learn this week well we learned that level design is a discipline that brings many other aspects of game development together to form what we always hope is a cohesive and enjoyable experience for the player

18. 00:13:48

    that the philosophies and precepts that guide their decisions continue to evolve as they learn important lessons from the development of Stanton and of course apply it to pyro and that pyro itself continues to inspire an experience that should be markedly different from the one we have today in Stanton for inside Star Citizen I'm Jared Huckabee thanks for letting us share the people and process of game development with you and we'll see you all here next week for