GDC 2010 - Level Design in a Day Part 5. Production - The Thrilling World of Workflow: Forrest Dowling, Lead Multiplayer Level Designer, Kaos Studios | THQ Inc.
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Please note: There is a ton of good information in the notes sections of these presentations. Please download locally and view in PowerPoint to experience all the juicy details. In this intense day-long tutorial, attendees will gain deep insights from some of the most experienced level designers in the industry into every aspect of the level design process, from basic navigation and object manipulation tips and tricks to best practices for encounter design and level flow. As the development discipline responsible for crafting the vastly important moment-to-moment player experience, a deep understanding of core level design principles becomes essential for level designers, game designers and design managers alike. Likewise, an intimate familiarity with the level creation process can be a massive advantage to producers, testers or artists in frequent collaboration with level designers. This yearâs session will focus on the Unreal Engine, while subsequent years will focus on Source, Quake, and other popular engines.
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GDC 2010 - Level Design in a Day Part 5. Production - The Thrilling World of Workflow: Forrest Dowling, Lead Multiplayer Level Designer, Kaos Studios | THQ Inc.
- 1. Â
- 5. Level Design
- 6. Workflow/Pipeline Image courtesy of rickz
- 9. The Handoff
- 11. Why did it happen?
- 14. What is locked?
- 16. A less crazy document
- 19. Single player process Image courtesy of max_westby
- 21. The Swarm
- 24. Submaps
- 25. The tangled web
- 30. 55 Ayleid Ruins 57 Imperial Forts 24 Mines 0 9 Sewers 19 Oblivion Realms 91 Caves . 255 Dungeons What Came Before? Oblivion Staff 1 Dungeon Art Lead 4 Dungeon Artists 3 Level Designers (late) 8 Busy Individuals Oblivion Dungeons
- 32. 13 Metro Tunnels 12 DC Neighborhoods 26 Office Buildings 0 6 Vaults 15 Other 8 Caves 68 âZâ Cells . 148 LD Locations What Now? Fallout3 Staff 6 Level Designers (peak) 4 Environment Artists Fallout 3 Spaces
Hinweis der Redaktion
- Notes! Woohoo!
- Define production When you make the game Prepro Figure out what youâre making Iâm going to discuss HOW you build levels
- Before production begins, youâve got GDD Budget Prototype Timeline Tools fun
- Level design during production This is where the LD needs to really shine Very collaborative time Lots of demands to juggle Serve as gatekeeper Responsible for making everyone look good How do you insure all this goes smoothly?
- Workflow Workflow/pipeline The steps or method by which you create your levels
- Why does it matter? Why not just build levels? Process reads as bureaucracy, often frustrating for developers Who needs the red tape? Itâs important because so many people need to work together Helps avoid problems Reworking for different parties Frustrated developers Endless iteration Eventually Crunch Overbudget delays
- Frontlines pipeline Not the strongest part of the development Designer brickout
- The handoff Art was given a map to âart upâ Often stylistically difficult to understand Designers worried about how it played Artist couldnât make sense of how it looked Rework Content often reworked drastically Interfered with FX, audio in maps Costs Scrapped maps that design had invested weeks or months in Developers frustrated Difficult for production to track Done-ness determined by schedule and necessity
- Phase system in FFOW Definitions fuzzy
- Modders mentality Team went from 12 on DC to 80 1 st major product shipped 1 st console title Scrappy âget it doneâ mentality that works for a small mod team doesnât scale well to a large dev team
- Current workflow Needed to define our process Needed to patch up some cross department tensions Currently, working fairly well Still areas for improvement, there always are Have remained flexible, modified the process on the fly This is what it looks like Absurd visio chart Way too huge, probably an overreaction Have simplified
- Stage breakdown Stages typically 1 month chunks Contain a # of steps Time box for task defined Deliverables defined Approvers listed Responsibilities detailed
- Locked Each stage ends with a definition of what is locked at the end Locked things can change Need approval from lead stakeholders Typically lead LD, art director Helps define fair game for iteration Reduces surprises and lost work And artist doing detail placement before structure lock shouldnât be surprised when work is lost
- Here are our main stages: Thematic research, concepting, paper design Initial brickout This takes 4 weeks Playable in MP test at this point Iteration & cross dept vetting â tech/art eval of content Large scale frequent playtesting Game mode play testing Optimization, art content added/finalized Bug fixing
- Hereâs an easier to read checklist This is basically how weâre tracking our maps right now Blacked out areas are secrets ï
- So far Initial estimates a bit off Better sense of collaboration Nothing cut
- For this to work, the following ingredients are needed Unambiguous goals Defined stages Approvers Process breaks down without these things You need âthe courage to be clearâ Discussions about levels can be fuzzy, focus on feelings Feelings are an outcome, not an actionable thing Cannot define a feeling, or put it into a process Approvers A lot of work can be lost when a director sees something late Give the people who have the greatest ability to disrupt the process plenty of opportunity to do so Get approvals, save time
- Our SP process Novel, unique, intertwined with capabilities of unreal
- Why didnât MP process work in SP? Lacked sufficient feedback Work lost, as directors couldnât follow everything that was happening More systems needed at any given time than engineering effort available All missions hit done at once Bottlenecks the art team New approach: SWARM Assign a team to a single mission
- Breakdown 1 LD, 9 encounters 5 LDs, 1-2 each Time to finish, 6-8 weeks vs. 6-8 months
- What have we gained? Collaboration within the LD team Designers always focusing on one anotherâs work Drive each other to improve More coherent across the game Greater specialization Matinee wizard Encounter type experts Builders Scripters We can play to peopleâs strengths Not without drawbacks, will get to them
- Sharing a map is a logistical nightmare Tech has been invested into making it work Still some workflow issues
- Relies on a rigid adherence to submap organization Persistent handles Checkpointing Submap loading Player spawning Nothing else Each beat has itsâ own set of submaps Geo, Design, Animation, FX, Audio Most extreme version: 3 encounters, 1 location 3 designers, artist, animator, FX artist all working at once Lost of high quality work done in days, not weeks Streamlined the interface Shrunk vertical height of each map Be willing to rework your tools to fit your needs
- Has allowed greater complexity Small focus means the roof gets blown off each area Major shift from FFOW, which was very simple Hereâs the 1 st mission in FFOW Our old ways would not have been sustainable
- Each LD unit has a lead Responsible for nightly build Seamless flow between sections Polices standards Drawback : single point of failure Path data needs to be in sync Not as bullet proof as a single owner approach Working on tools to reduce that risk
- What are the drawbacks? Loss of a sense of mission ownership In practice, not a huge deal People still own their part, laser like focus Good investment in the whole mission Group focus on pace, storytelling I like annoying designers by handing missions around Sharing a mission gets everyoneâs best ideas into it Allows designers to âjamâ like musicians, riff off each otherâs work Real main issue: technical FFOW: known-good check-ins worked well Broken check-ins were a big deal, swarmed by Aps Swarming often makes a known good check-in technically impossible
- Would I recommend it? Depends on project Heavily scripted encounters that can be tied off? It makes sense Depends on your tools Not every engine could work this way Depends on the team Weâre trying a new approach For us, the tools, design, & people are such that this approach is helping us achieve the quality we want
- Hereâs Joel Burgess, on Fallout 3