Designing the Tutorial for The Last of Us

[Music] hi everyone I'm elizabetha Sil and I'm game designer at naughty dog and I'm going to say a few things about me uh to give you an idea on where I come from and what I'm going to talk about so I started my career um at Ubisoft I joined the company as a multiplayer level designer that was my first job on split intercell double agent and then I moved out of my country uh I went to Germany I worked at kitech as a level designer in an unannounced title and after that I joined dice so I relocated again moved to Sweden in Stockholm and there I stayed about 5 years I worked on miror edge on a single player on the DLC time trials I worked on battle build that

Company 2 I was on multiplayer I joined single player and I also worked on Battlefield 3 then I switched team I went to help on Medal of Honor war fighter and now I'm at Naughty Dog uh and I work I worked on multiplayer and single player on the last of us so the topic is going to be the challenges I faced and this is about this is really inspired about my last year and a half at NAU dog and uh also I'm going to approach uh themes like changing new Studios and other challenges that I faced and at na do I really packed up all the challenges together I to join new team uh new tools new country new new everything uh so hopefully I will give you tips and tricks on how to survive something like

that so these are the main challenges I'm going to start talking about um I'm going to approach the new studio new tools new game and switching between single player and multiplayer so regarding new Studios um also you know when you join your first Studio I actually hopefully you're going to join a new studio one day and uh when you join your first Studio you have you really have no expectations about it at least I didn't have I was like oh I'm going to make game that's the best thing ever and then I discovered oh look I can have all the perks I can have free video games that I worked on and I started having t-shirts of the game I worked on which is for girls is impossible you always have like EXL size that you don't know where to put or you give to your nerd friends

and they are happy about that um you know new Studios uh when you start switching Studio there's always some kind of clash of culture and your expectation you have some expectations and some are going to be metad some are not going to be metad but I personally had always great experiences you know you trade something for something else and it's really great but not everyone U manages to survive this impact you know I saw people changing companies and quitting after two weeks a month six weeks uh they couldn't stand the new philosophy for instance um sometimes in some of the studios you're going to have like at naughty dog when I joined uh was a kind of a great surprise to me there was no no no uh

tutorial no documentation uh for learning uh their uh tools and you know some people will cringe I know a lot of people that would cringe and I was scared to death I'm like oh we're going to survive this but you make the best out of it so it turned out for me that it really paid off uh I personally you know when you join a new studio you kind of get sometimes to get used to to the culture you get some time to know people and not having documentation for anything it made me just go to the desk of of the designer next to me of the programmer next to me and just ask them things so at the end of the project and actually after a month I felt like at home I knew a lot of people in the project and it felt like I just I was just fitting and it just required me to be more open and

going to ask people things also different companies will have a different view of what a level designer is some companies will see you as The Artsy level designer and you might have to step up your game and learn how to make awesome meshes and do your own go and you know you're in an awesome companies and you're learning from the best people so what better chance there to learn something new and step up your game also you might learn that you love doing art and you might change your job and become an environment artist some other companies you're more like a scriptor and you will have to learn how to script and don't ever get scared of anything different is not bad different is a great change great change and great chance to learn something new that will just make you more more flexible and

more valuable as a level designer and you know knowing something more will make your layout better which is great as a level designer new tools so for this challenges tools are not your choice like ever and would you stop from working on a fantastic game just because you have to change a tool I personally wouldn't but a lot of designers specialize on tools and uh it's a career choice I saw people being hired because they're specialist in some tool and they would like teach all of us how to use it and that's fantastic but it personally is not my main focus my main focus is the game and working on the best game that's all I wanted to do and I've been lucky enough to do it

so my tip is adapt just you know I don't even try to make myself comfortable anymore with tools I see people using lots of shortcuts I see people making their life easier you know sometimes there are some tools that make your tool look more like some other tool that you're more familiar with but really I don't like to do it I like to make myself uncomfortable able because it makes my brain uh stay in that state that is accepting and humble so I'm never lazy I always learn new things and I don't stop anything from uh coming and teaching me something new also if you think about it uh the more you know the more tools you know the more valuable you are for a tool that might be developing in your in your own company and that's a fantastic thing you can

criticize to improve don't criticize just to change something because you prefer the way something worked but criticize to make your life better to make the life of all of your team better and your game better that's the greatest thing and the most valuable thing you can have also now for the new game challenge um so what do you do when you start a new game that you're going to work on you play sequels like I recently switched and moved to the Uncharted team and what do you think I did I played Uncharted one two and three big sacrifice right yeah anyways what what do you do this is what I call doing your hom workk this is where you study the game discover the game learn the game and criticize it find find out what you would have done

better find out what is Stellar about the game and you have to preserve find out the things that you could expand and add to the game and make it even better than what it was that said sometimes you might work on a new IP and there might not be nothing playable so at that point what you do is listen uh the first weeks the first month uh in The Last of Us I just just listen to everything that everybody was saying I wouldn't even put my headphones on and I was just full radar mode just trying to catch everything from the game you know ask tons of question to the people who had the ideas for the game find out everything just don't stop um when I joined the Last of Us everybody was super stressed it was really intense uh it was really focused and everybody was pushing their time try to put every

single bit of their time they had on the game and it was really intimidating approaching them but you know if you approach them uh they're going to be happy because you're making the game better you're going to help them making the game game better so you're welcome to ask them question and they're going to be super happy to help you so you can understand the game find out what it is about because you're the level designer and the plays in your hands for a single player multiplayer as I told you before I switched various amount of time I started as a multiplayer level designer and some people are going to be loving their single player and some people are going to be multiplayer only super specialized but to me uh versatility is the greatest thing not only for the company because I'm a better value for the company but for me

I take a break I learn new things and when I started a multiplayer I started learning about level flow and navigation and how to lead the player to places and how to put Power weapons and just creating vantage point which is fantastic and then on top of that when I switch on single player I learned about narrative and how to past the player and you know it was a great experience and I think that everybody should always try everything so they can make they can be a better value to the company and to themsel because one day there might might not be a single player game in your company one day there might not be a multiplayer game in your company and you have to switch it up now the concrete part is is focused

on what I worked on uh in the last of us and I started on multiplayer I moved to single player worked on the Combat tutorial and did some work on the multiplayer DLC my start on the multiplayer actually I didn't do any layout I was doing game modes implementation and I got my crash course to hours CR rting and that was actually the best thing ever I got the worst part of our scripting which was having to deal with players multiplayers and network and I iterated and I found out our controls and it was incredibly valuable for what I didn't know was coming next and also I managed to do some cover pass on level and layout polish in the multiplayer but almost all the levels were at a stage where we couldn't change much there was

only one level that was more flexible which was the dam level and I did some feedback and cover pass but that's that was very little and one day I was asked to help with the single player tutorial it's awkward so in the single player tutorial I was asked to help with the Combat tutorial uh and uh I started doing uh comat research so Bruce uh called me and said hi elizabetha can you help us with this tutorial we want to start and do the uh tutorial for the first gun gunfight in the in the game and uh there's going to be some tutorial layout you will do and uh you're going to script it doing AI scripting and also environmental scripting so took me over

he showed me where I could find all the play test in test cases and all the uh tutorial maps so I watched them a lot and then I started uh with this little area which was the first encounter you had with human Ai and there was nothing there there was just the Geo the main Geo around but but there wasn't any cover placement because that was not the purpose of the area at all and uh what he said to me is that uh there was a cut scene in progress and there were going to be three guys one of which was going to die because that's would shoot at him so here is how the area would go Joel and T would come over this way and then the two guys alive would take cover

and jolanes would be in cover and one guy was dead uh in this area I learned how to use the right AI for the place so I started scripting AI for the first time here and I put the AI there and they were acting funky they were not taking really cover and I was like okay it's a it's a first try and maybe there's something with the I you know I was like kind of shy and like not sure if I did something wrong or was the AI it's always the AI no it's so the level designer turns out that I didn't know that we had to use um this particular AI close combat range behavior and I didn't know about it because I was new uh so what I did how I discovered it was like asking help to everybody so ask questions and this is what I learned in this area and uh

also we tried to have a second wave in this area after the player was done but uh this area was way too tight for our Ai and that's another thing I learned our AI works best when it's in bigger spaces and we scratched that also you know it's the first combat so we decided that two AIS were enough for the player in this area we also have test as a companion and she wasn't really that helpful at the beginning so we stepped up their game and she's pretty aggressive in this video that I'm going to show so this is the area where you come from this is pretty tight and here starts the cat scene here we [Music] go let us through you guys need to turn around and head back if you know what's

good for you our beef isn't with you we just won't Robert you don't want to do this turn the [ __ ] around and leave now I'm not going anywhere without Robert [ __ ] I will bass your skull unless you turn around and get your dumb ass out of here [ __ ] this take cover so she's not the most friendly person ready yeah [ __ ] I'll cover you get the angle on them yeah so as you can see now thei is finally taking covering as I wanted and Tess is killing him by herself and this is pretty much the combat and as you can see this Corridor was way too tight and this is where the second wave would have ended up fighting which doesn't really have much space for anything not even cover and at this stage we we couldn't really change much

in the layout itself so we wanted to preserve as much as possible plus it's a nice pacing after the first combat so this is not really a tutorial uh this is just an alley but uh we thought about having a tutorial here and I wanted to talk to you about this because I learned a lesson we wanted to teach uh the player how to use listen mode so the idea was that this is a top down and we had um a pullup so the player and Tess would come up towards that direction and do the pullup and test would take cover and say hey Joel come over here I hear somebody's scamming and we would have two enemies AI coming over and while they were approaching the player would get a popup

saying use our two to use listen mode so you can see enemies coming there was a big problem the pullup it would have made the whole combat really Cluny and there was a drop down in the area afterwards uh which you're going to see so not fun not fun at all and the the space itself didn't really wasn't really great for combat so we just cut out our losses didn't even try to make it work and just left a good pacing for the player to go through and this is how in the end it played hey boost me up all right so as you can see this pull up takes really long time and imagine if the AI came down here and the combat exploded and then coming up and down and make it really weird so you could have killed

them while doing the pull up I'm sure we could have find a better solution but we were in such a late stage in the project that finding other solution wasn't really easy and as you can see this area is really tight and we couldn't really change much and here we get to the point that there is a drop down and there is another combat and that would have ruined pretty much everything in in the next setup and here is the second encounter which is actually my favorite I didn't do much layup changes here but I did a lot of cover changes and a lot of AI scripting so the main problem with the area after the play test after analyzing the play test was that uh all the anemi was inside the warehouse so it wasn't really sh showcasing outside

and the player would just engage combat and that's not what we wanted for this area this area actually we wanted to have the player to learn how to grab drug and kill stealthy so we took another approach we got the AI that was inside of the warehouse to move around so you could see them from the windows outside and also we got two guys coming towards the player so hope hoping that the player wouldn't be compelled to get out and start shooting and we also placed them facing conveniently other places so you could just stealth kill them and that would make also this area a bit unnecessary uh was too big and too like destructing for the player and we had this iteration just play tested and we spotted lots of problem with it first of

all the player started shooting there was a guy in front of him and you have a gun so you shoot at it and you know that didn't quite work well also they wear clothes but not too close and you still felt like oh yeah I can handle them I'm going to fight them no scratch that let's try another approach we kept the area and we had had the enemy eye coming towards you again but not stopping in front of you so you weren't compelled to head shot them they would go on the side so we use the side of the truck and also one enemy eye would come over and place himself on the side and just be looking at Fantastic crates which is great from the player and I'm a firm believer of leading by example and I try to do it as much as I can so I had Tess to set the tone for

the area Tess was going to go and take down a guy for you and that was making the difference actually so she would tell you to sneak out with her and she would take another cover position next to the warehouse so here you can go and take down the guy over the truck that is doing his patrolling or you can approach uh the area where test is in and there would be a trigger all around that area um so when the player approached that place the two enemies AI would go and talk to each other and Tess would take the position in the room to make sure she's going to help you with the kill so she's still setting the tone for you and after that she would say I take one you take the other and if you managed to do a stealth

kill she would Shi the other guy so really what the player was going to have to do was killing two guys total which is a good amount for the second combat and also if the combat exploded uh you know you had uh very few enemies left also one thing to mention is that since our AI now I knew that it works best on bigger areas cutting the left area with a truck was kind of a mistake because if the combat starts it's always better to have options and you can also hide from the guys and this is how it plays in the end more Robert's guys so you hear the player two of our guys died trying to take Tess out I guarantee that she and

Joel are on their way here right now to get Robert Jesus and here the player has free range of cameras so it's free to look at where the AI goes and also to look at Tess doing her ninja move move up move up so I this is me playing I like to kill this guy first second just drag Rob and kill him okay and I have less people spotting me in case I go and kill the guys in the room and he's patrolling around is not really safe so here I approached this area this side but I'm going to go and turn all the other side so you know I'm not lying and Tess really says that she's going to kill the other guy all let me guess

fireflies yep I lined him up against the wall and bang bang B you take one out I'll take the other the city they're cracking down on them hard I got a cousin with him seriously yeah idiot thinks he's going to save the world hope he's all right take it easy take thank you Anthony is our game designer at na doggy helped me in this area to hook up test and make her look awesome and we go to the third encounter which was the trickiest of all for me this area actually actually did change very very little um I did some

cover bu in the Interiors uh but the whole setup was pretty fixed the level was far in production and it wasn't really much I could have done to change the layout so I did what I could do which is um improve some things uh like the AI so I looked at the problem with this uh space and um again like the other places the the the player couldn't really tell which was the threat threat how many enemies they will have to face if they started combat and they ended up getting overwhelmed in tight spaces and there are like three spaces in this area and they're quite tight so starting a combat is not ideal and uh what I did like in the other area was showcasing the enemies but in this area particularly we were

introducing uh destructible which is bottles and bricks and since I believe in leading by example I had test throwing a bottle for you and doing a combo kill again unfortunately I didn't know that that wouldn't work because of our systems having test doing an animation and if the player was trolling her uh she would end up doing very bad had bugs and I had to remove it so that was not an option sadly uh so the only thing we could have done was putting a lot of throwables around at player height and hoping the player would take them and also give them a chance to use it like as you can see in the warehouse on the left I have two enemies AI that look at each other so you have kind of to distract one if you don't want to start a combat so the other AI would take

convenient position uh one of the guy would go back inside and the other one would take also cover inside but I'm not going to put any other lines because this is all up to the player actually test is not script except for following you and helping you in this thing but this is how it plays souare supp locked up good you can see I have the AI coming towards you uh not inviting the player to just engage combat there are three [ __ ] find them we'll check in with the others to come up with something okay and also inviting the player to take the stealthy route we also place this guy outside there but you have to e reiterate on Dr Rob and kill him

the other SP too so as you can see there are plenty of throwables but yeah that's is not really helping in any ways which actually makes the player fairly alone if he wants to take the salty approach in cool man so I had this guy in case the other guys start looking for him and then I proceed splitting up the two guys

stalking did you hear that it came from over there good for something

[Music] so I ended up using one throwable for two guys and I actually do a mistake from my play uh right now I get the last guy spot me but it kind of worked out really well because I'm using the destructible another way which is my favorite way to be [Music] honest so yeah he's coming and thankfully there's a bottle right behind me and I throw it in his space which is awesome

and as you can see it's pretty dark spaces all around so really starting combat wasn't ideal and this is the fourth encounter uh which is the dock encounter and is the one that I changed the most in terms of layout do you see the water over there that water wasn't water it was a humongous space with lots of AI uh this area had um also the shipping containers they were two tires and you could go on top of them so it was really two floors and it created a very overwhelming space for the player and flest results showed that a lot of players just died in there uh which highlighted few problems it wasn't just that the area was too big and so I closed off part of it I removed one layer of it and I also made the boat

unplayable sad I like boats but it had to be done and also I scratched out all the AI that was there and just pick my bottles and took just enough AI that I needed so this is how it ended up to be and the main problem actually of this area was another one it was a layout problem it was that so do you see where Tess and Joel are that is an elevated position with a good cover spot so there everyone was engaged in combat uh I did it too you know you get there you're in an awesome position you're in Advantage position and there is a guy and there is a head shot how can I miss that and that can totally handle all the guys yeah I died like all the

players so it was really inviting to start combat and feel really powerful but it was misleading because there were ton of guys inside the the warehouse that you couldn't see so what I did was I brainstormed with our amazing designers and we thought about a lot of ideas and of course theide IDE situation would be I changed the Geo no uh in this case changing the height of One Piece like that would have meant changing the height of all the levels after or all the levels before totally undoable we were shipping like a few months not possible so scratch that and somebody had the awesome idea to like use the cheapest thing we could possibly use and it was like it wanted me to implement it

with uh just one of our animation for vaulting and jumping down to just try it out and it actually worked uh so what we do here we make Tess and Joel jumping down the cut scene guys of course did it better afterwards but uh that totally did it because the player wasn't in Advantage position starting it wasn't the most brilliant move Joel could do jumping down of a vantage point but it worked and also I removed I asked the artist to remove all the cover in that big spot so even if you went up there again which was something we considered you were really Exposed on all both sides so it wasn't really a vantage point anymore for the AI uh in the first part when you're in the cut scene and this upper space I actually showcase all the AI in the whole level they just pass by

and you know exactly how many enemies you're going to face if you want to start combat and this is how we fix the first part of this [Music] level there's our boy as you you can see all the eye moving behind them they're all guys you're going to have to face in this area son of a [ __ ] so the player Can See Clearly that there are people going inside and they're going to have to face them if they start combat should been for a long time and this area uh is actually the graduation test of all the other areas so I needed a space that was flexible enough uh to support all the lessons we

taught the player I don't know who's left out there to sell us stuff and we also introduced introduced The Shave which wasn't a big deal because we already introduced stealth kills so we just put it there for fun for the player so as you can see the player still feels big and you know for the amount of AI is kind of perfect and it didn't really need much it just makes thei act better being more open and giving you more opportunities it up so you don't really need to kill these two guys I'm going to kill you can just go through the next area but I wanted to give you guys an idea of the space and how it feels now

that it's shrunk like half the size also I wanted to show how how good of a player I am [Music] also in case of a combat exploded in this part of the level uh the AI from the other side would just quietly approach you depending on how many enemies were left so to not overwhelm you in this big space because they could sneak on your back and in this area we had for the first time m guys so it was going to be kind of challenging having

everybody coming at you at [Music] once so the idea here is use Lisa mode um because you know that there six people but I know this level so I throw this in the face and I kill [Music] him and this is my work in the tutorial uh but I wanted to show some example on the DLC that I worked on and how working on the single player really helped me on approaching levels and what I did

immediately like after shipping the project I the The Last of Us I started working on my level for multiplayer because I knew there was going to be a DLC for multiplayer and I was really inspired for from this level um I'm not going to give spoilers because I know that some people didn't play uh but uh this is one of my favorite area in the game and uh my lesson here is that um when you have a plan for something when you have a plan for your level don't be afraid of take different things and do your changes because it will pay off you're going to gain so much time and this is how it worked for me I knew exactly which pieces I wanted to use for my level and I went to take them and this is how I change them so this is the bus depot and in the single player there's only one side where the player

is going around no spoilers sorry uh so I had to change it slightly on multiplayer I had to add a whole layer with uh access for the street levels so to have the flow I intended in my map and I also added another room uh towards the ticket side so it could really fit the size of my level and another building I used which is where you see giraffes for the first time uh is this building that really inspired me because it had an awesome uh potential for Sniper purchase and uh it was a great Terrace and had like interiors that were really spacious downstairs and I just needed a few twigs so in our multiplayer verticality is not

super smooth um and also our Radar really doesn't uh tell you if you're on the second floor or the first floor which is really paranoia maximum level every time you go around is really intense and having two fls is pretty much the best solution and also um it it was working better for us and also didn't Elevate all the purches in Crazy levels and crazy views and these are the other bunch of changes I did was opening up the second floor and just neat picking which place I wanted a player to be able to snip from closing a bunch of things and adding tons of axess so the player just could go on the second floor smoothly I have to say I think um this is our most vertical level that we have and it really worked great

so when I started um in pre-production I was actually Bey the other levels uh and I was like okay I'm going to take my time and then we started a play test and I actually ended up leaving my level because it was in a great state just from the first play test and taking over another one and this is what I mean for paying off if you have a plan it just works and it makes everything smoother so the thing is that the other level the only plan that the other level had the one that I took over was being as similar as the single player as possible which really didn't work for it uh the main offender was uh the height it created a lot lot of uh slope differences that were covered by lots of

stairs creating lots of Choke points on stairs uh which meant that the guys were exposed during during their trying to reach um interiors and it really wasn't doing great for anybody so lowering it it improved the flow and the access towards all the buildings the other thing I did was scouting for better asset uh the problem with this level was also that you know it's the suburbs all houses were looking the same and it's a house it has a living room it has a kitchen and as much as you change colors as much as you try to change up props it's a house it's it's going to be hard to tell which house it is and my idea was using different building and I I remembered from playing all the single

player more times that there was this building just right in the area next to it and no I can't say spoilers sniper area so I changed this building to fit our needs not having it too open and not having too access for snipers and uh it was one of our landmarks for this level also um I've been looking for bigger houses so we didn't have to fit it with just lots of spaces lots of houses and I found this one which is was pretty iconic with all the writings on top and it covered a lot of space in the levels and it removed two houses and of course it needed changes so we ended up removing the stairs and so to improve the flow like we did before and removing

the single player uh environmental storytelling because you know an single player an open window up there with something hanging is telling you something can tell you something in multiplayer is oh sniper is going to be there how can I kill him oh is he going to be there oh I better stay inside it really doesn't work if it's not used close it just be straight and use a language of interaction that works for multiplayer and that's it for me um the you know every game comes with its own challenges and you might be working on single player you might be working on multiplayer and it might be chaotic you might join a game at the very end of it and you got to make the best of it try to understand it and I believe if you follow these tips uh you might end up

like me uh which means that I not only survive it but I kind of look forward to the game development Madness that is um so this is the are the other dogs talking go to their talks uh Anthony is going to talk um he's awesome so good to his dog and questions I think we have two [Applause] minutes no questions no good guess I'm really

clear quick question uh you mentioned you use cinematic to get from like one place to another is like is there some hesitation in like asking for a whole cinematic just to solve a little problem well no if you plan for it when I joined it was really late and it was Madness asking for a cinematic at a very late stage I was even impressed for our animators what they did uh they actually let me change a whole area and they did Cuts so to allow me just to have cover and if they didn't cut it you would see like the player just running through things otherwise so um if you if you plan for it there's no exitation we actually rely on cinematic a lot so yeah I I was thinking like uh with

the memory allowance animation has for like cinematics and everything it like is there something that makes them want to hesitate to give you that uh no we actually again it's about planning it's about how you load your pieces of levels and then you you will manage to get everything in memory if you plan accordingly all right thanks no problem uh during the changes of the levels from the single paer to multiplayer how much did you cooperate with the environment artists or uh did you do all the changes by your your own and the environment artist was just looking screaming at you like what are you doing with my levels this is where I actually learned the most about level art and now our level artist work because um you know after the shipping the game came we had a break there was

nobody and I I had to find myself out what to do but obviously after we needed level artist I can't make things that pretty no way but yeah we allowed uh we had like level artists assigned afterwards and they did their magic for that thanks um how does the setting of The Last of Us affect your level design like um playing The Last of Us I guess have a really different feel um from going through the different levels like a lot more corridors and other fpss where uh the setting is a lot more open like if you think of something like Borderlands we running around like deserts and stuff like that so how did you consider that well um you know the game is totally different you know know your lower and the environment has to fit the game more

so you know the player is not going to run uh crazy distances so you can have tight spaces and have a tight feeling uh but for instance if you want to combat you build a larger space and in multiplayer uh we knew which size were working better and you know you play test it and you get the gist of it so thank you you're welcome um hi um considering that you talk about the different passes that you did through the levels usually what was the time frame between you know getting the feedback from the previous um you know iteration of the level until the implementation of the next one and you know the following play test you know um when I started uh we were doing like everyday iteration on things and you

don't need a lot of players to know that something is wrong uh so if something is wrong usually we just act on it and it's pretty quick especially at that stage you really want to play every second and we just you know at na dog we we sit all together designers so we just stand up grab a guy it's like can can you please play this and everybody's super flexible for that and the great thing is that uh it's the first time that I work in a company that is like this so single player multiplayer and the last of us were Uncharted we all work in the same pod and we are all together so uh and we are the best critics and uh and supporters for each other so the iteration are so fast and sometimes I wouldn't really even uh good to anybody to understand that something was wrong and that's the main thing just fail as fast as you can so you can make it

better okay that thank you very much hi um thanks for the great talk can you talk a little bit about the custom tools that you used for example did you have a level editor um was it easy to use hard to use uh just I'm kind of curious about the process the the tools that you use so we have different editors and and uh we use Maya for the layout so uh that's pretty standard and then we have other editors to implement a few objects to move around a foreground objects and we script with a scripting language that is kind of similar to Python and then we compile that and that's how we script thank you hi thank you again for the the talk um I have two questions one of them uh I

sry to mention about the AI that sometimes you have to deal with that and I was wondering if you have to also like code something or if it just work uh building the AI to you know certain points see how would it work against the player and the second question is up to what point do you start uh making the level design itself if uh they give like a rough sketch from the art or just some blocks and how does this affect your freedom to change and make your levels so for the AI the things I learned was how to use the AI because the AI was already there and I had precon of how to scrip the because I I've been using different tools and one of the things that I learned about asking question uh we uh I used to script dii that was in different states so it was in normal state where I was scripting it and putting in places and then I would script it for combat but that not how it works for the last of us

our AI was working best when left by itself while in combat and I had to learn it by my expenses I had a lot of bugs in this AI setups and that's how I actually one of our designer just came by and said why are you using two states I'm like oh thank you for fixing my te bugs I should have asked you but you know um so really depends which AI you're using on how heavy you're in scripting and uh what the second part of the question was um about when do you start making the level design itself if you start uh like the team gives you like a block stage or a rough sketch or something and how does that change your freedom to mix it up whatever way you think you it's better for the level design it depends like for multiplayer

there's no such a thing we scouted from this single player so we didn't have sketches or any the idea was basically feel like you're in one place in the game that you've been before and you get to Play It Again over and over and for single player I don't I tend to not let myself being blocked but bu some sketches I like to implement ideas uh that and then I just try to match it with the art and if I can't I start from the scratch right nice thank you very much hi hi so um so it felt like uh the tutorial came in quite late in the development cycle but when playing it felt like it wasn't really um it felt quite seamless to play so did you have to adapt The Narrative at all to fit the tutorial or create new narrative sections for it I couldn't create any unique section for it so I could just

tweak what was there and you know we try to really see the problems with the play test instead of just like I think we might change everything and also like finding the simplest solution and the easiest solution is sometimes is the best thing you don't need complicated thing you don't need the perfect thing to make it work sometimes just find find that thing that makes the difference is the key to make it better thanks right [Applause] [Music] awesome