Ten Principles for Good Level Design

In this video design director and level designer, Dan Taylor provides a breakdown of what makes good level design. He states that good level design doesnt rely on words to tell a story with three types of narrative at play within a games level:

Explicit - Anything that calls out to the player through cutscenes or text.
Implicit - Anything the player figures out by themselves.
Emergent - Anything that the player makes up in their own head.

He says the best way to explain these last two types of narrative is through a technique called Mise-en-scène. This is the art of telling a story through an environment and this is the element I am trying to emphasise throughout my major project.

GDC (2018) Ten Principles for Good Level Design [Online Video] Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNEe3KhMvXM [Accessed: 28/02/2018]

He goes on to break down his principals of level design into a list of ten points. I found these to be quite helpful as it highlighted certain aspects of environment design that I am interested in. Some of these points are related to game mechanics but others concern the visual design.

A good level design:

1. Is fun to navigate
2. Does not rely on words.
3. Tells what but not how
4. Constantly teaches
5. Is surprising
6. Empowers the player
7. Is easy, medium and hard
8. Is efficient
9. Creates Emotion
10. Is Driven by Mechanics

I am especially interested in points 1,2,8 and 9 as I feel without these elements the game elicits no emotion. Without some kind of emotional interest, I won't feel as though my environment art is successful.

Major Project: House Style

I have created a moodboard which I feel conveys the style of building I wish to create:

Prominent design features I wish to include are the large columns and somewhat angular design of the buildings which gives them a very American feel. The majority of these houses are real but I would like to exaggerate certain features in order to fit the needs of the games atmosphere. I'm trying to create a creepy ambience with the environment and one way I would like to achieve this is by making the mansion look overgrown with serious damage to the structure caused by age and decay.

Below I have created a rough blockout for the mansion exterior. The dimensions are likely to change as I begin to design the interior areas:

Rearview:

The blockout in Unreal Engine:

Rewind Presentation

Today I went to present my project at Rewind. I showed the team my environment and received some valuable feedback. 

They felt that the scene was well made but would have liked the environment to communicate the story to the player. I admit that when I was creating the environment I looked at various different sci-fi elements that I thought looked cool and incorporated them into my scene. The end result lacks cohesion and I agree with the team that had I kept things more focused then the final level could have been much better. I wish I had drawn more attention to the loading bay area which houses the mech. If I had signposted the players attention to that area, I could have conveyed more of the story through the environment. 

This is an aspect that I really want to improve upon during the development of my major project. The team said that the hangar environment looked nice but felt more like the generic parts of a level a player will have to get through rather than a key location. My major project environment will need to be clear in what areas are important. I want to focus the players’ attention to specific areas and this method may even save me time in the long run. After all, why spend hours working on a vast area that elicits no emotion when you can be far more successful with a smaller more focused area.

Regardless I feel this lack of emotional interest is something that all my environments have suffered from. I will be aiming to correct this in my next project.

My Second Attempt with Unreal Engine Sequencer

Returning to my previous project the "Red Chases Blue" space base, I went about setting up a new camera sequence to see if I could get a better result. You can see the completed video here:

This time around, I saved the sequence renders as a video file as opposed to a series of .jpg files. Whilst this had the drawback of creating a ridiculously huge video file numbering in the 30 gigabyte range, the end results seem to be a lot cleaner. There is no strange texture popping occurring and no cross hair in the center of the frame. When time allows I am going to return to the hangar scene and re-render the sequence using this method. At least now I can be confident that I can use the sequencer without any strange errors for my major project.

Rewind: Completed Video

As part of the deliverables for the Rewind brief, I have to create a 60 second video showing off the completed environment. This was my first time using the new Unreal Engine sequencer. I encountered several problems when using it. I recorded the sequence as a series of .jpg images but it resulted in some strange texture popping. I also noticed that the crosshair was still visible, albeit almost unnoticeable. The sequence took about 2 hours to render.

Finished Video:

I was able to edit the camera angles together within the sequencer in Unreal Engine. I found it was a little clunky overall and I ultimately had to bring the final video into Adobe Premiere for some clean up. However I am interested in trying this again with my Red Chases Blue scene from Semester A, hopefully with more success.

Saturday - Unreal Engine GDC 2018

This Saturday I had some fun tuning into the "State of Unreal" presentation at the 2018 Game Developers Conference and was completely blown away by the technical and visual mastery on display throughout the conference.

As someone who is relatively new to the field of real-time graphics, I must say that the gap in quality between real-time graphics and traditional rendering methods seems to have gotten so small. Factoring in the speed at which real-time graphics can display complex imagery, it becomes apparent that game engines have a lot of potential to revolutionise the field of 3D content creation.

I was particularly impressed with the "Reflections Real-Time Ray Tracing Demo" segment. This is a tech demo video demonstrating the photo realistic visual reflections created within Unreal Engine 4. This serves as a solid example of visual effects that now rival those seen in big budget films. With results this impressive, I'm eager to improve my own visual results with Unreal Engine.

So far I'm still finding it quite difficult to achieve a photo-realistic look for my environment. I think it looks fine but noticeable "gamey". I am planning to utilise what I have learnt throughout this brief and apply it to my major project development.

Unreal Engine (2018) State of Unreal | GDC 2018 | Unreal Engine [Online Video] March 28th. Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwKeLsTG12A&t=319s [Accessed: 24th March 2018]