Thorware.org

I feel a bit mischievous starting this thread simply because I really appreciate the visible hard work that has been put into this project and humorously, I really enjoy the level design of Lights End

However, level design - especially in RPG's - is one of my major gripes in which poor level design can really take me out of the experience. What I mean by level design is logical and literal design of a level based upon real life logic in the sense that every character in a town should have a bed to sleep in and every household should have kitchen to cook and eat within and a cleaning/bathroom area to cleanse within.

Already in lights End I have noticed some nominal aspects of slightly overlooked level design and by no means necessary do I wish to slate the foundations of this game (I think its excellent and a total breath of fresh air) but rather I am going to pose these question in an attempt to create awareness for an area in game design in which in my opinion, is vastly overlooked.

the first thing that I noticed is that after spending a night in OASIS, Crystal wakes up and criticises her bad odour and states that she needs to clean/bath. However, this notion within her crafted universe (i.e. the universe that the developers created for her to exist within) is slightly obscure as at the mining camp wherein the players learns that Crystal has spent her life growing up, there is no sign of any cleaning apparatus to justify the recognition of being dirty! Of course, i am aware of the reasoning behind this scenario as it used as a plot point for Crytal to bath in the OASIS bath house and then for Daniel to mistakenly enter causing each other to blush (a well written idea suggesting a future entanglement of relation between the two).

However back on topic, in order to solve this unfounded recognition of being dirty despite having never washed within the camp previously, rather that tediously putting a bathroom in every household to combat this incredibly small detail; lets be honest, doing this would be slightly over indulgent, i do think that it is important for the grandeur of the crafted universe that the camp should have some sort of small area in which the inhabitants could bath within- simply a visual 'nod' that would make the mining camp seem like a living breathing place that the player, at their own discretion and utilising their imagination, could exist within.

I have other smaller and hardly note worthy examples but I feel that if I was to go into such small details and depth then I may as well write a manifesto of level design as opposed to posting a forum topic to gain a little recognition for level design.


Regards.


Also, id really like to hear the thought processes that went in to the level design of Lights End (for example why is the workers hut [in the mining camp] upon stilts?) as despite my above lament/example, I genuinely enjoy the quant level design of the world

In the mining camp, whenever someone needs to be cleaned, they disrobe and everyone else in the camp spits on them; it's the very foundation of a tight-knit community.

I thought this was obvious.

Hi Foma,

Thanks for playing our game!

We will have to see what Gravity Lord, the artist, says about some of the details such as the house on stilts. But I guess our approach was to not worry about it too much. We did try to make sure that certain things were consistent, like everyone having a bed to sleep in.

The bottom line is that it's already a fantasy world within a game. Since everyone knows it's not actually reality, a lot of things are abstracted out. Where are all the horses when they're not being ridden? I think the biggest reason we and other designers leave out these details is because assets are expensive/time consuming to create. We try to minimize the assets we must create to tell the story and focus on the areas that are necessary.

Since the game has a cartoony look, it's already abstract to begin with, so you can't really feel completely immersed as if it were reality. However, I understand the uneasiness with noticing some missing details and I felt this way myself about games I played when I was younger!

Yet despite the cartoon stylings one can still become immerssed into that crafted reality and perhaps even more so if that created fantastical reality is based upon logical design. in my opinion, the game that does this best is Shenmue. We are well aware that the graphics are not real but because every single entity within that world has a succint place, a player 'playing the game' can delve into that reality and breath its computerised 'air'. Furthermore, in a game like shenmue which has great attention to detail, when it chooses to delve into the realms of pure magical fantasy it actually feels more believable because of its foundational base in reality.

In general, regardless of the abstraction of a setting i feel that good level design can aid immersion into that world. Of course, the horses don't need stables for the credibility of the story - but for the credibility of the world to tell the story, i think it is important.

Ah, verisimilitude…

A common RPG trope, whether intentional or not, is that no bodily functions are ever pointed to unless it is critical in some way to the plot. Others can easily be hand-waved with chamber pots under beds, which would never be referred to unless Crystal needed one to distract a guard with the predictable messy, slap-stick result.

Since there was no reason plot wise to introduce either the aforementioned lavatory or any other place in which characters could bathe, it was left open to player reasoning that such considerations were out of the scene and not something that needed to be explored given the plot (such as Poompop‘s ‘spit take‘). Of course, had we wanted to, the game could very well have descended into becoming a voyeuristic journey of bathing practices or an overly indulgent world study, and neither would really be worthy of release beyond a collaborative writing project.

On the subject of the labourer’s hut on stilts, I honestly have to admit that I don’t have a clear, in-game reason that will hold more water than a sieve, neither when I started created that level, or even now when I am being called upon it. When I was first imagining how it would look, stilts just jumped into my mind immediately and would not let go and thus I followed what my inspiration told me. After some thought I could argue that the other houses are on the ground because they have stoves to heat the building because its on the cool ground. The labourer’s hut on the other hand, doesn’t possess a stove and therefore the floor would always be cold unless raised a little off the ground on stilts.

As for the rest of the game, the majority of the layouts were directly based upon the original placeholder art Thor had produced with only slight variations on that. The details themselves stemmed primarily from just gut feelings and things looking good. Not a lot of focus was placed upon the history of any one place, however I would regularly refer to Thor during development to understand how it should feel.

Buildings were primarily focused on medieval style wood and plaster styles that are prevalent in many RPGs. This was familiar to players so that they could relate to the world more easily. The mining camp was primarily made of wood because although the buildings have lasted a long time, there was a sense of them being temporary, hence the term ‘camp’ rather than ‘town’. Meanwhile Oasis, while being the middle of nowhere is constructed using stone and plaster much like the buildings in the city. Oasis holds a greater sense of permanency in that so long as people need to cross the desert, people will have to find someplace to rest from the heat of the day and the chill of the night.

Sol had a strange impression in the original place holder art of being the be all and end all of the city rather than a small portion of a district. In fact, a great of writing was sent to Thor while working on the city design, defending the concept as to why the player couldn’t explore beyond the immediate area of city and to indicate that there was still more people than the few NPCs that bustled about.

The actual design of each area followed a simple process, starting with referring to the original designs created by Thor to determine what assets were needed and where they needed to be. Next was getting a written break down of the place from Thor in order to get the conceptual feel. After which, I would create a sketch of the environment in Photoshop with several sprites in order to eyeball proportions. I would mess around with the sketch until everything was placed comfortably and flowed somewhat nicely. Then I would start blocking things out in various colours so I could recognize what each scribble was supposed to be.

Creating the actual assets tended to take some time, especially resources that would later be repeated. Boxes and walls went through a couple of passes because they looked damned ugly at the very beginning but improved in quality as things progressed. These resources included wooden planks, collections of stone bricks, and roofing tiles, which when assembled would create buildings.

Non-repeating objects such as rocks and the actual ground were made from cleaner redraws of the sketch and blocking layers and had textures added to them to give them visual pop. On later passes, shading and lighting would be introduced in order to solidify the entire image.

The process usually took a couple of days, particularly when putting the assets together , sometimes in order to make them look right, but more often because something went wrong with the layers and transparencies and I would be hunting through 100+ layers to find a single stone that was out of place. The cathedral environment caused no end of issues such as these and Sol was also rather nasty.

Thank you for playing Light’s End and thank you for sending such an interesting post, Foma!

excellent, its these thought processes that in my opinion can really bring a game to life.

Many would argue that such endeavors are auxiliary but for me they are crucial ingredients; ones that are subtle and due to this are vastly overlooked within most mainstream games...

lights end is one of the good ones