View from the Axis – Using a basic array to draft a stair way through the settlement of Axis, you can see the green and red from your stand point but you will only connect at one point in many locations. To some, the color represents Z or Y, but it’s up to you to determine the axis. For me this is a vivid explanation of how everything is connected through a bridge of geometry the DNA we all have. Perhaps the very construct of everything that has ever been? For you, I present the wall of blue at which your perception is masked.
After playing through the first 10 – 15 minutes of Jonathan Blow’s Game ‘Braid’ I found myself in yet another puzzle game just like ‘The Witness’. He used one key mechanic (Time - Braid) and (2 puzzles – The witness).
Braid was entirely hand painted which for me made the game stand out more to me as a developer, I felt like the game was a piece of art all on its own. The aesthetic was appealing to the eye and the colors were amazing as well. The setting is washed out and quickly resembles Mario, mainly because of the pipes, flag and princess but that’s beside the point. After the success of Braid, Jonathan poured his profits into The Witness which had been in development from 2009, Jonathan decided to take 3D under his belt and learnt how to do things in a unique way. Braid; in contrast to The Witness, players are limited to basic movement schemes. Also, at first glance players are given the ‘Freedom’ effect in which players feel like they can go anywhere. However, they are actually limited by how much they know. For example, in Braid you can move to and from worlds with little information received, but as future progresses and information is gathered through the levels (puzzles, level design and verticality), the player can quickly and easily complete the puzzles from the past. From a design stand point this is the safest and easiest way to develop a game with little to no real ground breaking mechanics that you have never seen before. But, it's one completely solid mechanic that you can play around with in many different ways and polish the world around it. The Witness uses this to its advantage, as the puzzles are situated on panels on walls and objects. These puzzles can be seen throughout the entire game not only on these structures but also within the world. Let me re-word that, LITERALLY in the world. Path ways, clouds, trees, corridors and anything that looks like a line can be connected to a puzzle. This got me to thinking as to weather or not Jonathan had this in mind since the start of The Witness. It had been in development shortly after Braid was released which makes sense right? What if there was something more to the two games other than the obvious. This would mean me taking more time in both games and researching a fair bit more, but for now I can only speculate on the subject matter. To conclude Braid was a 90's retro styled game created in GameMaker – this meant that Jonathan had limitations to what he could use (sprites, animations, physics etc.) But with The Witness he had full control and with the idea, came an entire world filled with puzzle and mystery. This mystery is what I believe Jonathan has explored through the median of games. With his games taking inspiration from popular content and mixing it with his own flare to give it a good word. WORLD DESIGN THEORY - BLOG POST #6 - Evolution from ‘Braid’ to ‘The Witness’ - Conrad Turzynski22/5/2017 “From minute one, I knew that that was not what this game was. This game is a very focused, deliberate, puzzle game, where there are no extraneous elements in the game, aside from what helps to create the puzzles. There literally are none.”
- Jonathan Blow When talking about Braid, and how some people wished it were more of an open-world experience, Jonathan Blow explained what the game meant to him with the above quote. Braid is all about the mechanics of time travel. Blow changes up the mechanics between levels, and in later levels mixes them together, but the experience is distilled down to only the bare necessities. Instead of adding a lot of extra content, Blow instead re-contextualises his world by teaching the player how to apply their given mechanics in new ways. This means that the game never loses sight of what it is. There are set things that are drip fed to the players in a certain sequence. The game is designed so that the players feels like they’re discovering everything for themselves, and that they’re figuring the puzzles out all on their own. In reality, your experience is very carefully, analytically designed behind the scenes. The only gripe I have (after playing the demo, so to be fair this could have been changed in the final release) is the very beginning of the game. It does a really good job of setting the tone and context for the adventure, but the initial platforming areas are a little disappointing. After playing a reasonable amount of the game, and noticing the loving way the game is crafted, it’s a shame that the initial areas so lazily designed. The player is taught instantly how to jump, how to climb, that enemies can be killed by being jumped on, and that by holding shift, the player can rewind time. To finish the ‘tutorial’ area, and collect the puzzle pieces, players have to jump on an enemies head to get an increased jump. Directly after this, players then need to chain two jumps on two consecutive enemies to get an even greater jump height to get a second puzzle piece. After teaching the player subtly how to increase their jump height, right at the very end is a series of three ledges. Right next to the three ledges is a sign that explains how to jump to the player. WHY. There is literally no way that the player can have arrived at the end of the level without not only jumping, but most likely also jumping with a bit of acrobatic finesse as well. It’s a small gripe, but it does kind of make you feel stupid. The Witness is the second game by Jonathan Blow. Created off the back of Braids successes, The Witness is in essence the evolution of Braid. In a similar manner to Braid, the Witness drip-feeds information to the player gradually as the experience deepens. One difference I immediately noticed is that the world is open to the player right from the beginning. While this game is hailed as a more distilled version of the design philosophy of braid, this game immediately to me seems a little less concise. The game teaches the player the mechanics of the puzzles in a really straight forward way, which is really effective, but the openness does seem to make thing feel slightly overcomplicated. I haven’t played very far into the witness, and i’m sure that this openness would make more sense later on. To me, the main differences between Braid and The Witness seem to be order in which players can access information. The core design philosophies seem to be intact, and The Witness develops these a bit further. As one of the top designers for puzzle games, Jonathan Blow has paved the way for simple puzzle designs with a twist with not just one game, but two. Even though both of these games are different in terms of their main mechanic to explore the level, they both follow the same puzzle design philosophies and principles and excel well with teaching the player about the mechanics without a segmented tutorial.
But first the game starts off with a showcase of the basic mechanics of the game, usually starting off with a straight walk to where you will find your first puzzle. Where Braid is platformer that starts you off in a Mario-esque fashion beginning where the player is started off to one side and is forced to move to the left and where the Witness starts you off facing the first door where you will eventually wonder toward. Both of these games, don’t tell you the controls for basic movement when you first open up the game and will only hint at it if you don’t move at all. This tells me that the game is meant to have a very basic control scheme with a focus on added mechanics in the form of gameplay and not added button presses. Throughout both games, you will have an interesting variation of the core puzzle mechanic. It’s the philosophy that the you can have high-level expressions with a base of low-level concepts. This mean that if you have a good solid foundation for puzzles, you will have the options to branch out in many directions which implies that you will have a complicated game with simple mechanics. You are able to tell from the creation of Braid, that not everybody enjoyed playing Mario again so the creator added an interesting twist, this being the time warp, to the mechanics and adding pieces as a collectable to a puzzle that you needed to collect in order to proceed through the levels. This may have turned a lot of players away from the initial design as puzzle platformers aren’t as popular as first person games. With this in mind, I reckon the creator of Braid made the game with that notion in mind and made a game for gamers with a focus more on 2D platformer enthusiasts. To create interesting puzzles in the game, the developer tries to emphasise the core mechanics (being the time rewind in Braid, and maze puzzles in The Witness). This is usually overlooked with many puzzle as some developers try to create cool looking puzzles by using/adding more mechanics without refining the core concepts of the original mechanic. In Braid, in “world” the time rewind mechanic is changed in a way that ties into its platforming genre e.g. in World 1 you press a button to move back time if you miss a jump (works as a safety net), the way it works in World 3 is when you move the character back and forth you are able to change the flow of time and gives you a different approach to the same puzzle. In the Witness, the completion of the maze is made a little harder by giving rules that you need to figure out for yourself. This does resemble the “add more mechanics” approach to its design, but these puzzles are instead directed toward world design by having these puzzles placed in interesting areas of interest. WORLD DESIGN THEORY - BLOG POST #5 - simple architectural pbr materials - conrad turzynski14/5/2017 This week we experimented inside unreal engines blueprints editor and how to set up basic PBR materials. We took two simple tileable textures (wooden floorboards and concrete) and managed to create four textures, two of them made entirely within the editor with no use of external maps (Glass and metal) aside from a grunge map. Examples of each map and their blueprints are below. This is the first time i’ve made textures from scratch just using a few basic images. Grunge maps were and entirely new concept to me, and the possibilities these contain are really excited. We also touched on texel density briefly, which was also useful. Metalness and roughness seem to be the most important aspects with PBR materials, and trying to fine tune them to achieve a believable result is challenging. I found that by tweaking them until I thought they were done, and then decreasing the intensity of all of my maps by about 20% gave me nice subtle, believable textures. Adjusting values inside of the node editor, instead of having to go backwards and forwards between software was also a really nice thing to learn. The possibilities are seemingly endless when it comes to PBR materials, and it’s really fun getting them to just the right levels. This blog post is about what we learnt in the tutorial about materials. We spent most of this time editing tillable textures to make the normal, roughness and albedo. Here are some notes I took while in class. Then we started on the Photoshop techniques. Here are just a few of them Once we had set up all the maps that we needed for the test, we went straight into making materials in Unreal Engine 4. I had not really played around with the settings for materials in Unreal Engine 4 so this was a really good opportunity to learn all about this system. I actually learnt quiet about tillable textures in this exercise that will definitely help me in the future for texturing scenes. There are also a lot more options I wanted to test out e.g. Fresnel functions and grunge map that our lecturer had made in class. I also had help with the glass texture as Unreal Engine 4 has some limited settings when handling glass but there were some ways to work around that issue.
Textures and materials are key to making a scene look good. From what our lecturer was teaching us today, here is my example of a quick 2-3 hour gathering of textures from Google, creating PBR textures in Photoshop and joining them together in a scene I created in Blender. To give contrast here is the reference image I tried to match. This is an example of one of the materials used in the picture seen behind the glass walls, I merged two textures together and removed the rust color from the original image. The scene was put together knowing that the other rooms, outside area and back walls wont exist.
Great world design and level design is really specific to what type of game you’re playing and what type of genre it’s in. We can ask questions such as; Can the game lead you through the level without indicators, does the scene tell a story, does the character and the enemies fit into the game etc. These questions can be asked for any genre, but games that attempt the open world design usually have trouble filling the whole world with content. A game that comes to mind when it comes to great world design/great open world design is BotW (Breath of the Wild). What the game does successfully is that the game allows the player to make their own route (based on points of interest or just share curiosity) and is always filled with some sort of challenge. This type of design was improved by having really interesting ways to traverse from point to point with multiple routes to do so.
Aesthetically, BotW has one of the most breath taking environments that has ever risen in gaming history that is supported with a great deal of level design. The first few moments of the game gives player a quick tutorial which gives the player, base knowledge of gameplay and set of rules that allows you to finish the game with. This is then followed up by a picturesque view of what you may think is the whole world but player soon learn that the game is way bigger than that. This camera angle is smartly composed and so beautiful that you often want to just jump right into the fray and see what’s going on. The player will soon learn that the game provides you with queues to show that the player needs to be and will need to proceed with caution. Even though this view is quiet pleasing to look at, you can instantly tell that the character cannot just jump as it would probably kill you and even if you did you wouldn’t be penalised that much as it would just take you to the beginning which was only a few moments back or to the quick-save point. With this knowledge in mind, the player then shifts down the ramp where they will find items that will help them interact with the environment, teaching the vast amounts of interactivity with the environment that the game has to offer. The motive for moving from point to point is rooted deeply in every aspect about the games design. From the Sheikah towers that can be seen from every highpoint or mountain, to the quests that tells the player to explore an unknown area, the game wants the player to explore the seamless and the organic nature of BotW’s open world. The Sheikah towers plays on of the most important parts in exploring the games topographical map as the game over world is broken up into sections (this seems to be in sections of difficulty). From mostly anywhere in the map, if the player is able to see the tower that has not yet been activate, the journey there will have well placed enemy camps that test the player’s skill (especially if the player likes to travel quickly by horse) or going around the problem by traversing cliffs and finding glowing orange shrines that complement the games naturally blue hue on the way. WORLD DESIGN THEORY - BLOG POST #4 - Open Topic - Zelda: Breath of the wild - Conrad Turzynski7/5/2017 Zelda: Breath of the wild (BotW) is a breakaway from the traditional formula of the Zelda franchise. The developers wanted to reinvent the series with this new entry, while maintaining the core values of the series. While traditional Zelda games are consists of worlds broken up into sections, this time the game was made as one, seamless space, one of the largest in video game history. For example, Ocarina of time, the first 3D entry in the series, is 0.098 sq. km, while Breath of the Wild is a staggering 360 sq. km. Having a world broken up into areas separated by load screens was a necessity in previous years, as games did not have the processing power at the time to render large play spaces on screen in real time. With today's technology, however, this is not the case, and having this massive new world comes with an entirely new way of designing player experience. The developers also wanted to accentuate this new style of Zelda game, by designing the Sheikah, a technologically advanced race, in a unique style. For this, they looked to Jomon era japan to inform their design decisions. Large worlds are difficult. On one hand, they can feel like massive, barren wastelands, and on the other, they can feel like complicated spaces teeming with possibility. Both of these can be confusing to players. A tool that really can not be ignored in an open world, is land-marking. BotW uses this masterfully. Players are taught early on in the game that high vantage points will show them what they need to see to progress. Sheikah Towers dot the landscape, and each one offers the player a vantage point that not only serves as a tower to scout from, but also as a data hub from which players can download the map of the area the tower is in. These towers glow bright orange when they are inactive, and turn blue once players have scaled them and downloaded the map. This means that when players enter a new area, the towers are easily spotted, and give the player a beacon to head towards. Once atop the towers, players can view the new area in 360 degrees, giving them context when they head down to the ground to further their adventure. Sheikah towers use lighting, size and silhouette to contrast against the background and sky to make them easy to spot. Sheikah Shrines, of which there are 120, also cash in on these techniques, with a particular emphasis on lighting. In a game world so large, finding 120 shrines really is a mammoth feat, and while shrines are hidden and must be found, they do emanate bright orange light, making them impossible to miss if they do appear in the players view, even for a split second. This makes spotting a shrine exiting, and also makes it feel like a fair challenge. Also within the game is a Shrine Sensor, built into the players Sheikah Slate, which is essentially the players phone, with a camera, documentation of things they've seen, their map, and their quests all managed within. The sensor itself helps lead players to nearby shrines. At first, I personally found this sensor annoying, as it bleeps away when a shrines is near, but after spending some more time with the game, is now fills me with excitement as I try to find more of the elusive shrines. Without it, I think that for most people the task would be impossible. The architecture of BotW intrigued me a lot, as there seems to a be a myriad of styles at use. Each of the many towns littered throughout the game has a different style, some of them referencing feudal Japanese architecture, and some having a more European feel to them. This gives each of the towns it's own character, and makes them easier to remember. The most interesting of all the architecture has to be that of the Sheikah. The Sheikah were influenced by Jomon era Japan. This is a relatively unknown era of japan's history, which made it a perfect embodiment for the mysterious Sheikah people. The forms of Jomon era art and architecture feature rounded edges, flowing patters and organic forms. They seem to reference water, but this is only my speculation. Having a high-tech civilisation in a medieval world is a strange concept, and the organic spiraling forms of the Sheikah give it an alien feel, but also one that seems to reference the rolling hills and rivers of the land it resides on. The towers especially seem 'alive', the forms feeling more like flesh than masonry. Sheikah architecture glows in a bioluminesent manner, adding to this. Sheikah remains litter the world, and are often encorporated into modern towns and villages. In short, BotW guides the player using lighting, landmarks, composition and light, diagetic elements, such as the sensor. The architecture helps to build and inform the world. |
World design theory (WDT)DevelopersThe goal of this blog is to relate current and past attempts at world design to further improve our understanding. Archives
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