Sten Huebler
Level Design Challenges in Crysis: The Long Journey to Open Worlds
For me, day two began with Crytek's talk about level design in Crysis. At first, I thought that this session was supposed to hit an audience of game and level designers but then I remembered that: everything about Crysis is of interest. And because of this big name in the session title, I attended this first talk of the day.
Sten’s talk dealt with the design process of Crysis. From a gameplay point of view, this is not your average shooter. The whole game takes place on an island, which can be navigated using many vehicles. In order to build a rock-solid game experience, the game design team needed to get a logical understanding of the whole game area. So they decided to abstract the game location (they built numerous graphs to present the game flow and the main scenario) and once they got this done, they began to design the game.
Every location was made using several iterations:
- Idea/concept: bringing material together to build the location.
- Layout, first pass: these are really two phases, but they have the same goal: at the end of the first pass, the major gameplay and graphical elements are here.
- Second pass, alpha: same here (these are two phases). At the end, we get a beautiful playable game.
- Final: the final pass brings additional awesomeness into the game. Graphics that were just good are enhanced to be really good, gameplay is tweaked a bit to be even better and so on.
Sten explained how that worked for the three main design teams in Crytek: the gameplay team, the art team and the technical team.
The gameplay team had to leverage a set of unique challenges, which were introduced gradually in the game because of a unique feature: the nanosuit. The nanosuit introduced new ways to play and new gameplay opportunities. In some cases it required a full redesigned of specific zones, in order to make them more “nanosuit aware”.
The vehicle and AI management was a bit easier. However, in some cases, the levels had to be carefully tested in order to discover incorrect vehicle paths (because some rocks were introduced where they should not have been). A full set of AI guidelines where used to ensure that AI would work correctly.
The development of Crysis taught a few lessons to the game designers:
- First, prototype really early. The nanosuit proved to be a problem while developing the game because its features were insufficiently developed.
- From the prototype, derive guidelines: they will help you to be more consistent through the whole game design process.
- “Discover the specialists in your teams and utilize them”. These are Sten’s word. If someone is good at doing something, use him to do it.
Artwork was divided in two phases as well: during the first iteration, art designers and artists worked together to build the world. The first optimization and polish pass is included in phase one. During the second phase, 3 programmers joined the 4 artists to improve the game performance.
The art team was expected to build a photorealistic world. I think we can say that they succeeded. That doesn’t mean that the team didn’t learn anything in the process:
- Do not start the art pass too early: gameplay comes first, it is better to wait a bit for the definition of everything before starting the polish phase.
- From what I understood, the CryEngine2 has several limitations that could have a tremendous impact on the visual fidelity of the game. It forced the designer to take texturing into account very early in the design process because it would have been difficult to modify later.
The technical imperatives given by the game engine also had an impact on the designers work:
- Assets == hardware resources. The designers had to focus on important stuff; less important stuff offered the possibility to save hardware resources.
- For everything, artists and designers had to follow some rules and obey a set of limits – without exception.
Sten Huebler finished his talk with one slide that listed the key lessons that have been learnt by the game design teams in Crytek.
- Fail early and iterate faster – the earlier you fail, the earlier you can find the correct direction.
- Understand your priorities – it’s better to get everything important first than to spend too much time on unimportant details.
- Challenge your favorite ideas – to test whether they’re good or not.
- Derive guidelines from your prototypes – your prototypes should give you the opportunity to test ideas and to build a complete set of rules. The designers can then use this set of rules when they build the final iteration of the game.
- Use your team smartly – some guys are better than others when it comes to do a particular task.
Ben Cousins
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Southwest Gaming Expo
