Google Maps, Not Greyboxes: Digital Location Scouting for 'Untitled Goose Game'

[Music] hello and welcome to my talk google maps not grey boxes digital location scouting for untitled goose game before i begin i'd like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land that i'm recording on the luxury people of the coolant nation and i'd like to pay my respects to their elders past and present sovereignty was never seeded and this always was and always will be aboriginal land my name is jake strasser and i'm a member of house house we're a small video game company from melbourne australia in september of 2019 we released an untitled game about a goose which i couldn't have done without the help and hard work of these people m halberstadt did the sound design colonica helped us refine the game's look very early on then came back to fill the village with plants dan golding made the music and cherie davidson implemented a bunch of accessibility features the game was published by panic with production help from felix kramer and nick sutner we were funded in part by

film victoria and 22nd century toys helped port the game to consoles they're all wonderful people to work with and i wouldn't be here giving this talk without their help households is myself nico disodop stuart gillespie cook and michael mcmaster before we started making our first game push me poor you seven years ago none of us had any experience making video games i was fresh out of film school michael and stuart studied fine art and nico spent the previous year teaching himself to program by making psychedelic math toys we're all self-taught multi-disciplinary game developers we work by consensus and make design decisions together by talking and arguing until we find that consensus it's a slow messy inefficient way to work but it's very fulfilling both lots of fun to have lots of conversations with your friends all the time and because it produces work that we can be collectively proud of because we all agreed on it every step of the way

my level design practice in the goose game emerged from this collaborative reactive iterative setting in september of 2017 this is what the ghost game looked like we've been working on it part time for a year or so working in that collaborative reactive iterative way to build it from the bottom up starting with the goose and just kind of snowballing out from there so we made the goose we made a person we made some stuff that that person cared about and explored the kinds of systems and environments that made it fun to steal that stuff and build things up step by step from a level design standpoint i've been working in a pretty instinctive way up to that point drawing on the bbc kids shows that we grew up on i'm basing a lot of the garden on my grandparents backyard where i spent a lot of time helping out as a kid my priority up at that point had just been to kind of jam as many different playful dynamics into the level as i could goose was the first 3d game any of us

had made so i was learning how to use blender and unity at the time and was exploring what i could do with the tools that i had for example each garden bed does something different so it ended up feeling a bit like a playground there's the high plains you can hide behind the potato plant you can hide inside of the pile of dirt lets you get up high and a bunch of different plants and vegetables that you can interact with in different ways we were just exploring all the different things we could do with this game so questions about stuff like setting and context were kind of secondary at this point that was about to change though in october of 2017 we released the first public video of the game showing off this level and people got very excited about it up until that point we thought we were working on a bit of an in-joke with very niche appeal we were honestly preparing to package it up packing a package up this one level and put it on ichio for free before moving on to some other more kind of serious project

but the response made us realize that maybe we were onto something and so soon after that we got funding from our state government thank you for victoria and cable from panic sent us an email and before we knew it we had a publisher a budget and the opportunity to work full-time on the goose game and so now we had to start thinking seriously about the game as a larger finnish thing i had this vague pastoral british setting that had come together in a kind of automatic way but it seemed apparent that working off of tv shows and memories of australian suburbia wasn't really going to cut it for the kind of game world that we wanted to end up with don't get me wrong shows like brum postman pat fireman sam and wallace and gromit are incredibly valuable starting points they influenced all sorts of things like characters settings the materiality of stuff even the comedy the goose game is a response to these shows in a lot of ways but they were just a starting point and if we're going to make a game set in the uk i wanted to be very careful about the

way that i represented it i felt a real responsibility to ground our chosen setting in the real world and do it with a sense of specificity authenticity and new ones but there was one kind of major problem standing between me and the authentically captured british village video game level of my dreams i don't live in the uk i've never lived in the uk and i've never even been to the uk so i had to find some other way to try and absorb process and then authentically represent the i don't know what britishness the geographical spatial material historical ticks of a place i'd never experienced firsthand we showed the other level to some friends from the uk and asked for feedback on whether it felt authentic or not and one of the things they flagged was this chain link fence now i know that chain link fence is the thing that exists in the uk i've seen photos of it there are uk

businesses with dot co dot uk web addresses that sell it and i'm sure there must be a garden like this somewhere in the uk that has a chain link fence just like this one but our friend said it was just wrong it felt wrong you wouldn't see a fence like that in the garden like that this was the kind of thing i felt i had to be very careful of and i forget if i could get something as seemingly obvious as a chain link fence wrong i wondered how i was going to go authentically capturing stuff that's even harder to put your finger on what are the accumulative set of details and nuance that make a village feel british i didn't really know and i certainly couldn't put it into words now but i wanted to get as close as i could to capturing whatever it was in our game so back in late 2017 we were piecing together an outline of what a finished version of the game of the goose game might look like on top of the garden level we already made we envisioned three more self-contained levels a shops level with a very protective shopkeep and a wimpy kid

a set of backyards with two neighbors you could play off each other a level in a pub that felt a bit like a fortress that you had to infiltrate and some kind of finale to give the game a resolution although we weren't sure quite sure what that would be yet we also knew that we wanted to have all these areas fit together in contiguous space even though the challenges in each area would initially be self-contained we wanted to eventually eventually allow free travel between them as the player progressed through what we like to call dark souls doors a gate locked from one side that when opened allows travel between two areas that had at first seemed geographically isolated from one another thank you so i had this nested task ahead of me of designing these levels that had their own discrete gameplay dynamics logic and setting while knowing i eventually had to situate all these things in a hole and i wanted it all to feel authentically british whatever that meant so when it came to actually start

building the levels in order to imbue them with some kind of spatial authenticity from the very start instead of beginning my levels with great with a grey box layout i did what felt natural as a filmmaker and went location scouting for real world locations that fit the need of our design goals when you're making a film in need a location unless you have heaps of money to design and build a set you go out location scouting and find a place in the real world that fits the requirements of the script and since i couldn't just pop over to the uk to go location scouting i did the next best thing and jumped onto google maps and street view and started looking around i started out just by first trawling around different villages from all around the uk looking at how things fit together how waterways parks churches shops and houses interacted with one another how different landscapes available building materials or economic histories helped shape them i was particularly interested in looking at how the stuff i already had a body of

water a green and a semi-public garden probably owned by a church on council fit into real villages i took a pretty scatter shot approach to my research and just kind of drifted around the internet slowly building a list of villages that i could imagine the goose game being set i was hoping to build up a kind of special literacy for villagers and also find specific locations to act as a source for my levels and i did i did this because i didn't really trust myself to design with grey boxes i thought if i was working in that totally abstracted way where the spatial application of game design overrides everything else it would be even harder to tell if i was doing things wrong like designing the spatial equivalent of a chain link fence i thought if i chose a source location i could return to whenever i needed that match the level i wanted to design as closely as possible i'd have this external thing that i could check my work against and that it might keep me more honest as i built out the level

as i see it my level design practice on the goose game was all about maintaining that dialogue between a source location and the level as it developed it's about maintaining a constant back and forth between the disciplines of research game design and environment art allowing the affordances and requirements of the source locations gameplay and aesthetic restrictions to feedback and inform one another in all directions as the level comes together let me illustrate this with the story of how designing and building the shops level broadly from a research perspective i knew i wanted some shops in a village setting that meant location scouting for a small privately run general store in a more commercial part of the village our art style was starting to feel broadly pretty established but moving from a more green pastoral setting into something more urban presented new challenges we still aren't really sure what buildings should look like in our game or whether like a big expanse of grey concrete would look any good

and the restriction of our game is that everything has to happen outside or at least be visible from outside so all the shop stuff needed to be out on the street we're also interested in having the level be this kind of interplay between a very dense restricted area where where all the stuff is and then quite open empty space around it so as you play through a level the dynamic would be sort of this i don't know ducking in and out of this danger zone of the shot i started out by letting our design goals for the game the game design direct my research and went location scouting for commercial areas that had a goose game levels worth of space around them finching field in essex was an early favorite in my village shortlist i'd come across it through image searching village green with pond and it was beautiful but it didn't have any shops that i could see working as a goose game level these ones sit on quite a busy road and didn't have any room out the front for stuff to go and for or for the goose to run around without feeling like you might get hit

by a car so on a whim i went looking around some neighboring villages and found just a few miles away that's did it was historically more of a commercial hub in the region and has this lovely wide old market square in the middle of town with a medieval guildhall overlooking it all importantly and unlike a lot of villages i've looked at it had this very deep footpath laid down when they ran a modern street through the old square that created this very deep open space between the road and shop fronts and allowed traders to put stuff out on the footpath i thought this location might serve my purposes for the level so i put together this sketch based on the shops in vaxted i realized pretty quickly earlier like early on that i needed to put this curve into the line of buildings to try and keep the play area focused around the central shops and as i kept working on the level i drew in a bunch of dressing from facstead in street view in the same spot i could cycle between different capture dates

and find heaps of different different ideas for props and dressing and level geometry so here's 2009 and 2014 and 2015 and 2016. there's such a wealth of information in just this one spot and a lot of stuff from thax said went up in the finished game from 2009 i got this fruit and veg stand and these shelves from 2014 these hand trucks and plants and from 2016 these tubs and toilet paper and just next to those shops this little scene offered the post box pump rubbish bin and bench as i worked on the level when i needed some kind of level geometry or dressing i go back to the location and look for features that would suit my purpose and could do it with confidence knowing that they're all coming from the same place so it all fit after about a month working on the shops this is what they look like we'd set ourselves a time limit of a

month to do a first pass on each new level and so with the shops looking like this we moved on to the backyards and after another month on them the pub we're trying quick to quickly feel at the full scope of the game and get a clear picture on the amount of work it would take to actually finish it and so once we had roughly playable versions of each level i laid them out as an interconnected village for the first time to start to get a feel for the game as one big level and just start processing in the back of my mind what the village on the whole might look and feel like and now that i was thinking more holistically when we looped back to the shops for a second pass it started to become clear that maybe thackstead wasn't the right location for the shops or for the village overall the deep footpath which it seemed like such a great discovery early on combined with the density of the buildings suggested a much larger urban town that i wanted to portray plus thackstead's pastel painted houses

looked weird and kind of immaterial in our art style the footpath also failed to fulfill some of our game design requirements the level needed to be enclosed by walls of some kind at the peripheries which the location that thackstead just didn't support i tried curving the line of the buildings to focus play in the middle but the play area felt too long and skinny and wasn't it wasn't clear where the edges of the level were so i went looking for other locations that could offer a solution to my level layout problem and offer a more holistic direction for the village i looked at pedestrianized options like this one in helmsley and i love the tiny village feel of mortal and its general store coming right onto the road they were both very pretty villagers but neither really solved my layout requirements of depth or enclosure which i realized was my main issue with thaxten they both felt very open at the peripheries and long and skinny like streets tend to be so what i was looking for was something that felt like a street but wasn't

really long and skinny and was enclosed by natural feeling boundaries a street that wasn't really a street and while i was mulling this over i was also just working day to day on the dressing of the shop itself in my folder of collected reference photos i had this one of the authored general store at some point i visited the village in street view i think to get a better look at that awning and eventually realized it presented a solution to my layout problem so this is pump street in orford with the general store right in the middle the space formed by a diagonal road and the right angle of these two buildings gave me enough enclosed space to keep the level contained while still feeling like a street it feels intimate in a small village way and i like that the pump and the space left around it suggests a kind of historical function of the space that has since changed i started spending more and more time looking around alfred researching its history and getting better acquainted

with the village and it started to feel like it would make a good source location for the game overall it was a medieval port with a 12th century castle edge of town i like the modest georgian architecture and the red brick that everything was built from it's beautiful in an understated functional way that feels recognizably british so i reconfigured the shop's layout based on pump street and it was immediately a big improvement over the tax dead layout as a level designer i thought the flow through the level felt much better the opening areas around the shop felt more contained and they funneled the player more in and out of the shop which is what we wanted the level to do as a researcher the layout felt quite unconventional as a streetscape which i think helped make it feel more specific and hopefully more authentic as a result it stopped feeling like any old footpath with the long string of shops and houses and started feeling more like a unique place with its own quirks and history

and as an environment artist i was happy to be working on a level that didn't feel so long and flat and being able to draw from a source location that felt more coherent and pleasing when rendered in our art style helped me move out of a sketchy non-committal art and into resolve final assets much quicker than i expected as i was working on the level and looking at pump street i wasn't interested in faithfully recreating the location one-to-one my priority was to make a good goose game level that was fun to play so in the places where the pump street location didn't work for whatever reason i go looking for the rest around the rest of authored for a solution for example these real buildings on the left side wall didn't work for the game we needed an unbroken edge to the level and i needed a spot for a phone booth and just 50 meters away in real life is this hole with the phone booth there on the left and putting it in the level made it feel more like the center of the village rather than a back street it's functionally just a big wall so it felt like a good opportunity to dress it up with an interesting facade that

helped contextualize the street and when i went to fit the two shops into the space i really liked the long terrace building that was already there but needed two distinct shop fronts and just next to that hall very close by it offered are these two shops which we first which first went into the level with their original black and white but i repainted it at some point i put this garage into the level early on just because it was there in the location and i liked that it gave it a bit of visual variation it was just kind of a non-descript wall collider really and i didn't put much thought into it but then much later we were working on what we called the gating puzzles they're one last task that goose has to do in each level to open the gate and proceed to the next one we were trying to work out what the shop skating puzzle could be and i was thinking about how since the shopkeep spends all their time chasing you out of the shops it'd be nicely ironic if you could get her to chase you into a trap and the garage was already there ready

to go it was the perfect place to trap her and it was the first gating puzzle we came up with and was by far the easiest to implement and the least contrived because it was already built into the location this was probably the clearest example of a source location directly informing or even directing our game design the shops level ended up being a kind of collage of these bits of offered with some some of the specific dressings sprinkled in from thaxter and the most important thing i got from putting the shops level together uh this way it was a sense of direction for the village and an overall sense of direction for the village in the game by committing to this one location for the shops level it felt like things started to fall into place for all the other levels as we went move back through and refined them the backyards were originally based on these houses in backstage and the level started looking out like this and looked like this by the end of our first pass they were the most tightly designed and

contrived spaces by far and since there were private spaces i thought i had more artistic license with the specifics and worked more from reference than any specific location but when it came to came time to situate them in the rest of the village i joined orphans terraced housing laneways and a bunch of different fencing from around town and ended up with this and the pub was originally based on the fox in pertin and looked like this at the end of our first pass this version left a lot to be desired and i wanted to completely redesign the level so i spent a lot of time looking around at different beer gardens and pubs all over the place do you but do you know what was waiting for me in orford the crowning castle we had a bunch of different design requirements that i needed to work into the space like the decking the staff only area and the guided entrance but the location helped inform the overall logic of the space and especially the

ways that it interfaced with the street and surrounding level land sorry once i committed to using it as a source location what had been a real design struggle came together surprisingly easily in hindsight it's kind of outrageous how well it worked it gave me a layout and character and once i'd figured out how to work our level design requirements into the existing space i was able to build out and dress the level incredibly quickly because i had such a clear source material to work from and there was one last major offering from orford we were working on the end of the game there's a final level where the goose breaks into the model village which is a miniaturized version of the village you just played through so you retrace your steps as a godzilla and when we first sketched it out ended up at a miniature church which had a golden bell in its miniature belfry the goose had to steal it naturally so you tear down the tower and make off with the bell that was all well and good until we decided that maybe it was just a little bit on the nose to have the goose

destroy a church even if it was a miniature one during the climax of the game so we needed an alternative fun tower to pull down and started to think about castles and do you know what's right next to the pub in orford and right next to the pub in the goose game it's the perfect goose game castle like the pub it feels too good to be true that this one village will offer up all these locations that fit our needs so well in this way the world of the goose game is a collage of real world places by maintaining this dialogue between the level and source locations i was able to create highly designed levels that supported the goal of our game design while keeping them rooted in a real world location that i hope brings a sense of place history and specificity to the work i'd like to finish off now by talking briefly about why it was important me important to me to take this approach and reiterate some of the valuable things that came out of it

so how come why does a silly comedy game about a goose need a research focused approach to level design my first were social concerns in the same way that stereotypical representations of people can be dehumanizing i think the same applies to representing the real world places that people live it was my hope that the people who played our game and saw themselves or their lives implicitly represented in it would feel comfortable with what they saw we're also conscious and wary that idealized betrayals of rural village life can be pretty politically fraught and can dovetail with a conservative narrative about the world i thought that by being as specific as possible in my representation it might help a little to ground the game more in reality rather than some idealized version of it secondly we're creative concerns i think the grounded world of the goose game plays an important role in the humor of it in the goose game the people in the world act as a foil to the goose's comedy we could more easily give the player

control over comedic timing and bring them in on the joke because the world they're presented with is grounded in a kind of mundane familiarity this extends to the kind of objects and spaces in the game too familiar stuff socks radio gardening tools and familiar places have all this inbuilt baggage in players heads like if i hang a pair of socks on a clothesline i don't have to do any extra work to signal that it would be naughty if you stole them and threw them in the pond i don't have to explain the socks of this person's favorite or that she specifically hates it when a goose throws her stuff in a pond players just get it so by keeping the world grounded in mundane familiarity i think it helps players quickly engage with the game in a more confident playful way which was especially important with the goose game because we needed players to feel confident enough to try and be funny i also believe that just like players are able to instinctively intuit whether representations of a face or movement seem right or not they also process

levels and spaces in the same way the hotel in the shining by stanley kubrick is infamously full of impossible rooms don't probably fit together it's full of doors and windows that shouldn't exist or lead nowhere and kubrick wasn't the kind of guy to do anything like this by mistake so the film nerds think he must have intentionally made the architecture of the hotel itself feel uncanny now i don't think an audience consciously knows why things feel a bit off but i reckon their subconscious recognizes something's wrong and i feel like it's easier for games to unintentionally end up with this spatial uncanniness when levels get built in a void in isolation from one another i think aesthetic continuity can falsely supplant spatial continuity and the kind of concrete geographical consistency that makes game worlds feel real on a subconscious level can get lost and i think the players whether they could consciously recognize it or not pick up on that loss and game

world start to feel a bit like the overlook hotel just a bit off so it was important to me to take great care to ground my levels in a real place making sure spaces are contiguous and maintaining a geographical logic and consistency to the world and i hope that this would let the world of untitled goose game feel richly concrete to players in the small mundane ways that real world spaces do the relative positions of spaces and the way they fit together become quietly remarkable and help create valuable moments of discovery and recognition for players as they traverse the space i think that basing my level designs on real locations rather than grey boxes helped me keep them grounded in the real world as they came along i found it be a flexible workflow where i could be more or less faithful to the location depending on the needs of our game design i'd use the location to inform the general layout or logic to a space and

then i could then fill it with the required gameplay elements and then i'd fill in any blanks by going back to the location to look for details or features confident that they would be appropriate to the space this was also quite an economical workflow although it took more time up front to get the right location once i did i could work really quickly since the right location is so rich with valuable information the pub level went from being rough as guts to near finished in no time once i'd settled on that location in office right through development i found it really rewarding to just wander around in street view letting my subconscious absorb a whole heap of information i think building up my literacy in this way made me a more confident designer and better able to intuit whether my work was going in the right direction or not this unfocused aspect or kind of broad offering that a source location gives you is really important i think although i might have chosen a location for one reason like the layout of palm street in authored a location brings

with it all sorts of other hyper-specific information but has the opportunity to surprise you i put the garage into the shops level because it was in the location and it was the perfect filler for an unused wall and it ended up offering us a solution to a central game design problem i found this approach immensely rewarding there's an aspect of giving yourself over to a location when you're working this way and trusting in it to offer up the things you need to put a level together as a level designer and environment artist i found that working in dialogue with a location like this meant that i could better focus on what the game needed and let the location offer up the rest i'm really proud of my work on the goose game and i hope this talk has offered a bit of insight into how it all came together and i hope i'll get to visit orford in person at some point soon thanks for listening bye you