Keeping Level Designers in the Zone Through Level Editor Design

real short on time but this is gonna be a big thing we're going to run through five editors so I hope this time for questions at the end if not we can go to the overflow room and then we get asked questions there all right hello everyone I'm Robin storm and here to talk about keeping level seven zone whoo level editor design I'm a little designer in the Netherlands and over the last nine years I've worked with all kinds of editors and engines both public and proprietary in-house ones over the use of these headers I've grown accustomed to having to do the same thing in many different ways some of these ways made it easier to enter the zone and others made it more difficult to reach a zone but what is the zone the flow state being in a zone is completely subconscious you don't choose to get in or if out of here out of a flow state your brain does if the editor does not allow for enough complexity anxiety sets in and if they're gonna make some tedious to perform tasks boredom sets in if the editor allows for complex tasks to perform skillfully flow is created and the developer gets into the zone which means content quality goes up and

quality development time goes up at the end of the day it may even be surprised at how much you got done look at how to minimize those flow Stoppers by comparing five different and widely used editors and now we can use that information to improve future editors both for public and in-house use now I'm not talking about how the game is is communicated to the level designer or how the editor interfaces with the engine in this talk I'm specifically talking about the level designer - editor interface the UX this is the critical point where a developer can either get in or out of the flow state this is also the critical point from having a game on paper to having a game in the engine this is where all the creativity let's loose and gets put into a shape where that the customer can find as such is very important step it's often overlooked or sometimes disregarded now the electors will be looking today our hammer Unreal Engine for unity the screen creation kit and 3ds max now these editors are all widely different used for a huge variety of games in genres and all I used by companies to make awesome levels with which was while we're looking at all of them and showcasing their solutions to the same

problems level designers face everywhere all of them also allow for customization to improve their toolset but for today we're only going to look about the database editors with no custom plugins otherwise we'd be here next week still and although we cannot look at first party proprietary tools we can recognize similarities in these public energies that we can apply to our in-house tools so we're going to look at these specific level design necessities navigating the editor creating geometry snapping editing geometry terrain texturing lighting importing assets placing assets and playtesting we're not going to do every single bit for every single engine as time is limited so we're sticking to the most important parts of learning about the UX we will not be discussing scripting i/o visual scripting share editing nav editing optimization and requesting speech trees there's also more stuff these are all very important and these editors carry both good and bad examples of them as really interesting but there isn't enough time in an hour if you think I missed something for a specific editor or you would like to discuss these features anyway cool then just come talk to me after the presentation lastly before we go into

the meat of the talk I've noticed there are jargon and terminology differences around the world for developers some say engine and mean editor and some say level designer and also mean environment artists or a combination of both hopefully with the visual trainers presentation will be clear what's being talked about if not please come talk to me after a talk or email me my email is here and also at the end of the presentation okay so let's start with navigation so we need to be able to get wormy to be fast and quickly see any part of the level from any angle sounds simple but how these editors facilitate this let's look to collect hammer so there are four windows one 3d and three 2d from the top front inside this means that at all times we have a good idea of what the layout of the level is and we can zoom in and out of every window so we can quickly see any part of level if you specifically want to understand better and we can fly around freely look in any direction we may like this allows the levels are interesting in the flow and pick and choose what they need to see very fast and we can make new windows as well although they do not duck so it takes a bit of handling if there are many windows this can take us

out of the zone as the set of seeing something quickly we may have to find and align the window first hammer also has a really neat system called cordon with it you can make a box and anything inside that box is rendered anything outside of the box is not you can resize that box and create more boxes if you like to only let one part of the level appear this makes it quick to navigate through a set part of the level this keeps level design in zone especially once levels have gone very large and very complex at the end of the develop cycle also you can run the level with only the visible entities running so tracking down bugs becomes visual as well again increasing flow and making it quick and visual let's take a look at unreal again we have four windows one 3d and three 2d although this time they all zoom in at the same time this is a tiny detail but it can affect flow as we may want to see one part of the level from afar and another opposed with this system were forced to zoom everywhere and we can fly around freely and look in any direction at any time so this makes it quick for the level designer to see what they need to see and we can dock the windows so we don't clutter up the monitor with loose windows this makes it more likely for flow to happen let's we don't clarify monitor we have to search

for that right window which mind the Autobahn which other one I'm gonna be alt tabbing this is nice and fast let's take a look at unity again we have four windows one 3d and three 2d so we can see any part of level quickly we can also create new windows if we'd like and we can fly around freely and look in any direction at any time we've got a flying camera just make sure we can see end a level quickly by both the macro and micro level and we can dock the windows again so it into any configuration we can also have one 3d view and know to diffuse if we'd like to we also know again clutter up the monitor let's take a look at creation kit ok so it's only one window and we can't create any new ones this makes it more time in mind consuming to get a fuller idea of the level and the window also does not duck so we sort of have to be careful to like align it right and if we have a many menus around we also have to juggle them and we cannot fly around freely we have to rotate around a selected object so we have to change objects and I'll rotate around them this system is very fast when using wide open areas and getting a quick overlook overflow area but this doesn't mean I've gone through a small intersection such as this requires some

fiddling as we have to find the right object to rotate around and depending on where we are so first person is how the player looks at the level in this case the orbital camera might be fast for looking around objects but the player won't look at the level in that way so the workflow the orbital camera creates is one of which many player centric developments will be missed that can become a massive development issue caused by a seemingly tiny UX issue cycle ok 3ds max 3ds max again halves for Windows we can zoom in on our debt cetera and it has the same orbital camera that we just saw in the creation kit so we can take a quick look around but it also has the free flying camera if you need to look at a smaller select part of the level so we can do both we can do one singular object and we can fly around and look at a huge level so what do we learn from looking at this well multi-window is make it possible to see more of a level at a glance we see with them we can quickly find any part of the level and always have an overview multiple windows help us stay in the zone and docking windows can personalize a workspace and increase speed loose windows can make you lose focus and having to search for them which can make for a messy view which takes us out of

the zone and a free flying camera works in all cases and while orbital camera can also work it requires more actions in indoor spaces having both can speed up work here also if you're making a first-person game it helps facilitate player centric design and the hammock recording system increases visibility and speed in especially large and complex levels navigating through a large width and complex level becomes much faster making sure the focus is on what is important instead of having to deal with the complexity created over a long development time now mind you none of these particular things are necessarily engine related any editor is able able to have any kind of camera system or a system where you draw a box and anything outside that box isn't rendered so that's not engine related any other there's possibility of these features if the time they save outweighs the time spent creating them now of course navigation is also tied to UI so let's grab a specific example the creation kit is made for RPGs which means you have a huge amount of variables tax and assets to tweak this means going through many different menus and to say what is any menu we have to click OK otherwise we lose all the work we just did in that menu ok so let's

take a look at some of the menus in the creation kit and where those buttons are ok and the question menu it's down and to the right it's the same location as with most windows on PC so the levels on is used to it and will not interrupt the flow let's take a look at another menu it's not on to the left ok it's not terrible yet so once we used to working on one menu we have to adapt to the other which can take us out of the zone one more menu so why is the ok button suddenly all the way up there one it can take a little time out of the zone and two they might click at the X which is right next to it if they did 20 minutes of work they might lose all of it and is seemingly tiny new axis you can cause this now of course the creation kit is not the only one in the system there's many editors that do these kinds of things and sure they're technically usable but do they facilitate creativity sometimes these issues creep up over time due to recent such as this is way we've always done it or it's not necessary to spend time improving it just deal with it but if a developer continually has trouble with an editor tool it's not their fault it's the fault of whatever designed the editor think of it like when a player cannot find a go in the level do we blame the player or

the level designer so why wouldn't we be not blame the tool designer if a user continually makes mistakes with the tool now this book of course is a must read and most people know that already but there's also so much wisdom in here for tool designer please read it in your own time if you want to like to improve your own tools and editors let's take a look at creating the basic geometry so we need to able to quickly place in size basic geometry and to replace large tracts of map quickly and accurately because building something is only 32 percent of development time iterating and reworking is the other 70% of development time so let's take a look at how hammer tackles this problem we can select a primitive to play such as a box a cylinder etc and then we simply click and drag and we have an outline of the brush that we can place anywhere notice how due to the four windows we can quickly and precisely place the brush exactly where we want to we don't have to find a pivot we don't have to look around in 3d view we simply click and drag where we want it to be this keeps us inflow of work and we then just press ENTER to make it appear we can change the size by grabbing one of the handles and just dragging we instantly see the measurements on each side in each 2d view so we know exactly what the sizes are and any time we select a brush so if we know a player walks at 15 units

per second or an acid was made for 512 units we can quickly size up the map for both the player and for the environment artists also saving them time let's take a look at unreal unreal 4 we can click and drag the place a brush of a basic primitive however we cannot see the measurements right away we have to sort of click and drag for each side of the measurements this adds a step for every single brush we want to place and for which we want to check the size the bang on the player and the alarmed artists so tiny thinks just this is now creating this butterfly effect however in the bottom right we can also see the measurements and edit them to change the brush size and to move the brush we have to specifically click on the pivot compare this to hammer where we can just click on the brush any part of the brush and with this one we have to find like one of the three slivers and click one of those again time you thing but it can save some time take a look at unity so we can again can place different perimeters however we do not know any of the measurements as we're all given the scale of the object again this can cause a geometry or art bottleneck that might bite us in the ass later weeks or even months from after placing this basic geometry now using the Rex tool we have features slightly similar to hammer but

it's almost unusable because none of this can be snapped though the scale numbers do change so we can place things but not accurately replacing entire sections of a level will become very messy without snap geometry and accurate measurements now if we were to build an entire level based on these geometry tools it would be building like a mansion without a proper foundation it might seem okay now but the entire place will come crashing down if the earth so much as shifts a centimeter let's take a look at 3ds max now there's a large amount of primitives we can choose from here this makes it slightly more flowy to four levels to be less of just boxes and hallways as we have other shapes to choose from and a premise also can be easily changed there for placement we can click and drag to change these variables keeping a low designer in the flow by allowing them to quickly do a complex task however again we do not see your specific measurements on each side only the height and a radius now we can't check for the measurements throw by going into a separate menu and clicking two points however where's the measurement now check it guess it's all the way down here again it's a tiny thing but if we continually have to look up and down the mother it's not going to promote flow in

our blames it's going to promote annoyance which will not improve the quality of our levels so what did we learn here hammer system of quick placement basic shaping invisible measurements is very very fast there are no menus necessary because everything happens where the developer is looking and pointing their mouse this makes it easier for the level designer to get into the flow than having to use menus it also enables the developer to iterate extremely rapidly if a level at the end of the development cycle needs adjustments now we can do so in seconds and minutes instead of weeks and months well and we'll also use this VSP the system is slightly slower overall and placing basic geometry due to requiring a menu and typing to perfectly sized up a brush and a unit assembly has next to no uses level editor there are plenty of editor plugins though that you can buy we're just looking at out of the box functionality today and 3ds max has a large amount of basic geometry to choose from so a level might all not only be made out of boxes they're also edited to a menu but in that case it makes sense as they make quite complex however at this point if you're an unreal developer you might be thinking ah that's great yeah that's you have those opinions but I'm faster making things in a real then you are making things in hammer and you

might be right so instead let's grab some facts how many clicks drags typing a button presses it does it take to create a 512 by 512 by 512 brush and hammer versus in unreal okay so when how many you would click twice drag twice and press a button once and I really need to click twice drag ones type three times and press a button twice now that might not seem a big difference but only one brush making a basic level can make it can take thousands of brushes and that's only one level these extra moments of typing really add up on a project and that takes that six months to even years for 10,000 brushes the difference becomes between 50,000 actions in 80,000 actions that's the 30,000 action difference almost half the time and that's almost one third of the time saved just because the UX of one editor requires fewer actions than the other it's not the engine it's not the user it's just the UX that causes this time loss over development cycle this is huge and sure you might say hammer is ancient but this is a tool from 1998 and it still works that fast I mean people are making businesses out of providing similar tools for unity and unreal engine for developers it's not about CSG

or BSP it's about how you create geometry and it's just how about the UX of creating that geometry so yes if you look at the time reference in in differing UX actions hammer is faster and creating basic geometry levels but that's just basic geometry what about complex geometry it's a different story so we want a place and add it comic somebody very quickly so we have a set of complex geometry we can choose from this time we choose an arch we click and drag out a shape and a menu pops up but you can change the properties of the arch and after we press ok we can scale and skew it but we cannot change any of those properties anymore that we saw on the menu changing a number down here only applies to new arches not old ones and this exact same thing goes for cylinders we place one but after is it set change a number of slides besides does not do anything apart from when we place a new one we can edit it but that takes considerable manual time so we kind of quickly accurately replace large complex sections of the map so this makes it more difficult to get into the flow when it comes to complex geometry in hammer so this could lead to levels aren't creating only boxes and hallways because that's the flow of their creation and that's what they can oh that's allow them what to do in the production time available let's take a

look at unreal no real business all had to place our curves there we place it and then in the menu we have many many different options the inner radius the angle of the curve the step height even a number of stairs like as you can tell this is full of flow it's visual and that allows allows when to do a complex task very quickly a level designer will not shy out to make a section with the curves there so if after playtesting i want to quickly change a complex piece of geometry we can do so when it comes to these specific primitives unreal also has a subtractive brush system for example when we create a sphere a place it inside a brush and make it subtract we've then created a hole so if at the place s thing want to change in large section of indoor space instead of having to move this six sides of a room we've only place the one brush that makes up the room so we don't have to create this whole different thing so what did we learn here well having a huge variety of primitives make sure that even complex geometry will be flow viable on both unreal three is max allow for these complex presets to change with numerical values which promotes flow even with complex levels and geometry

and both also immediately and visually show these changes in the editor views there's no need to replace entire sections by hands like we would have to do in hammer so instead of being afraid we might have to cut levels or stick with old content due to production and time being low we can you just create what we like with high quality time can be spent in the zone creating what is both good quality for the player and good quality for the developer a good thing here is to remember this interesting design comes from iteration and trying things out if the editor does not facilitate this then the design of the game will stagnate we do not think of an awesome design that I make it and publish it no we think of something cool we iterated and we find things that we never even knew were awesome and then we use those four great features so allow the level designer to it away it was for in the editor and the design of the game will flourish with it before to know more about this I recommend looking at this talk from GDC 2014 by Chris McKenzie from Ubisoft in it he explains the how the amazing editor they made called ub art used for raymond to make it possible for a single level designer to build an entire level and the boss with mechanics and place asset just through the editor just one level design i mean think how many iteration cycles you can be sped up

solely by improving the editor ux let's take a look at snapping tools these are very important for speed and flow to quickly connect everything and make sure the level designer or artist can create art for the right size so not void or holes are seen by the geometry by the player okay so wanna snap anything to anywhere sounds simple how do these editors do that when we move a brush around in hamburg it automatically snaps to the grid so we never have to worry about anything being off grid ever unless we specifically tell it to be this makes it easier for the levels line to focus on the level and get into zone its don't have to worry and double check all design and we can quickly change the grid size with hotkeys and we instantly see what the right size is again the four windows help here as we can see in any direction where we are in the level and what we're snapping to let's take a look at unity and unity we have to go into a separate menu snaps we don't have any hotkeys to change the grid this is a huge deal as we now are flowing be continually interrupted to find the right size to work with and to snap we also have to hold down a key on the keyboard specifically which can be a physically cumbersome task if we're doing this over

long sessions though we also have vertex nav capabilities in case we're using modular assets this is really fast take a look at the creation kit an equation Kate we also have snapped a grid but the grid is invisible like I'm changing the grid here but you don't really notice unless I jiggle something around so we don't get instant visual feedback and if we want to fit something we can do that through a vertex snapping or even better we can select a reference to snap to so as long as the assets themselves are by measurement rules we can use this a snap what we want even on really weird angles so we click on this click on this click on the thing that we want to snap it to and now it's on the same kind of grid level as that other model is so we don't have four windows so we kind of still have to look around and see where it is but boom there it is it fits so even if something on a really weird angle we can make complex levels really cool gameplay and it still is easy to edit later let's take a look at 3ds max the shoulder snaps adding some extra go into this menu have a huge variety of snaps available and we can also change all these measurements there are shortcuts to change these settings it can be customized as well if you want

to snap anything you can do it in 3ds max okay so what do we learn from this like a large variety of snaps is nice as it saves time and create possibility for complex geometry and levels that is still easy to edit it maintains flow while writing for a wide variety of gameplay possibilities and vertex snaps are specially useful for modular games off grid snaps again create a possibility for complex geometry you don't have to worry about a particular complex session of a level becoming too complex to change later it maintains flow over the entire project length and helps with every part of level placement in geometry lights assets anything and of course fast snap changes with hotkeys are nice as having a go through menus cost valuable time and cognitive effort but let's take a look at the differences these hotkeys jaquise just can make how to change snaps and what and what the current size is for all five errors I'm talking about I mean that's pretty crazy that's not to say hockey's are easy to do though they have their own problem problems as well so let's say for example we have a new editor feature and it's called geometry lock has been decided to use ctrl L for this as it uses the same letter ok sounds good let's do this

so we have to use this feature a lot let's say like once every two minutes I mean ouch I mean my hand is like stretching two roots and struggling to respect that position it's just not nice to use let's take a look another one control s we use this about 50 times an hour and we use it all the time it feels nice it doesn't hurt my hand I can keep on doing it all day let's take a look at shift M okay it's a bit further it's still possible though and I was painful as control L let's take a look at control all team you can look at my what my tendon is just whitening out I mean this is an often used shortcut even just two times an hour at the end of the work week I will need physical therapy to make sure that my hand isn't hurting every single day and that's just through a shortcut but I'm not saying this should be standard for every single shortcut because then we're going to run into this forty competing standards we're gonna make the one ultimate standard and others fifteen competing standards standards are sadly not realistic but hopefully we can work towards making these shortcuts less physically painful I mean all these shortcuts I just showed you are from actual editors that I have been using anyway let's move on to the next feature editing geometry we've placed it maybe

we changed some values but now we want to really put it into shape okay so let's ask to be able to quickly add a geometry cool let's take a look so we can use the products tool to move forward vertices around it instantly see the result this keeps a level designer in the flow focusing on making a level awesome and we can also place a bounding box for more complex geometry that'll have a lot of vertices so only the vertices inside that box are selected so if it makes a really complex geometry we can still easily edit it later without fear of becoming a mess that is hard to edit with a clipping tool we can click and drag to create a clip that cuts a brush into any shape we like and we see the cut in both the 2d and the 3d views then we press ENTER to cut and the red side is removed removed as shown in the 2d view we can change which side is cut by pressing the tool icon so we can cut a different size a size or only cut and not remove any section everything is very visual we obviously exactly what's going on we never have to double check we can then also individually move each section if you want to let's take a look at unreal and all we only also have a vertex tool so we can click and drag to

select which registers we want and then drag them around and we also instantly see the results however we have no idea what the measurements have become none of the measurements and if you imagine if I may you now there have changed and also we cannot shape the brush using these vertices because if we try to do this perfectly every time it's goes to the pivot point is still gonna be at the old location this requires has to go through a drop-down menu to set the pivot point and save the pivot point every time we do a vertex edit on a brush so over thousands brushes this will be this will take us right out of the zone because we have to focus on making those pivots fit perfectly otherwise maybe end up in a situation later where we want to move a brush and the pivot may be at the other end of the map after a long time in many iterations so over time this can cost us a lot of time and a lot of flow from many different level level designers now the clipping tool for unreal arises the point somewhere press spacebar and then point somewhere else and tap spacebar again we can not see what we clipped in the 3d view though and if you want to redo the clip we have to redo the entire pointing and spacebar process as we cannot move the handles individually and we have to try to gauge what will be clipped it because it was not tried and then try to clip it will tell us to

refocus on the window but there's only one clip so why would any real refocus the window there's only one we could use and when we do clip this also doesn't seem to be working entirely correct in this case I mean all in all it's just a mess if key presses are now placed that's not visual at all and as it may require some time intensive reduce to edit geometry looking right later let's take a look at 3ds max now the 3ds max we have a very unique system of editing we can add triangles at at an at a poly modifier and then individually move vertices faces and edges around we can also add a use amount of different modifiers in this case we're using Bend and so we bend something real quickly and then we go into the stack and we want to change the geometry so for this case for example we add an edge loop and then we edit those edges to be like a different kind of shape I want to make something sci-fi for example then we go back up to bend modifier and boom there it is quickly visually it just kind of works and there are many modifiers for all kinds of different cases like terrain water rocks the spaceship holes now you may be thinking well that's a bit unfair to compare geometry editing tool to level editors of course 3ds max is faster and allows for more complexity

that's its prime purpose but I'm not directly comparing them in their quality I'm only showing the different solutions out there for the same problems all these editors have made amazing levels for video games and they're all being used for love editing what we can learn from this what can we learn from this well in this case modifiers aren't saying okay they allow you to edit in shape any kind of geometry in any shape you may need and quickly to and geometry editing tools such as vertex cutting extruding etc only clear visuals as without them we may have to redo work as we can't see what needs to be done which can take a level down out of his own and we have to redo work now of course this is a tiny part of geometry editing tools that I've just shown there's been much more out there for even more complex geometry we can also learn from other fields for example this is a piece of software called form Z used a lot by architects in it you can use a spline to place a complex wall very fast and it a bit fast to edit it fast to I mean think of the gameplay possibilities when a level designer can easily place way more wide variety of geometry both the possible contact complexity and the direct content quality go up because the developer can do what they wish with with their flow maintained which may think yeah but we can already do that in our tool at our

editor right here it just takes more clicks than these editors but we can do it just because the pipeline is functional doesn't mean the pipeline is done you actually know why matters for games as much as you actually buy matters for editors you might think well it works so it's done but as you've seen in this presentation small issues can have large production impacts just because you can do something in a tool doesn't mean the tools are finished and we can cease development on them a really great example if for games about this is The Witcher 3 the button to loot and the button to extinguish are the same which means if a player opus and chest and a candle is nearby they might extinguish the candle instead of looting then they try to open it just again and then I we like the candle again now you've done two actions and you still haven't known what you want to do this was such a big issue for players that was actually patched very soon which is awesome if a CD Projekt RED why is that awesome because this wasn't a game critical bug you could play through the entire game from start to finish completely it didn't leave you stuck or crash the game and yet it was discussed on multiple articles hundreds of threats were made about this and it was quickly patched that's for 45 hour game we were with editors for multiple years years and yet if we run into any ux issue we

tell ourselves well we'll just deal with it you worked issues like these can be very detrimental to the work as developers so don't stop developer tool when it functions stop developing a tool and it allows creativity to flourish and just as much as a scientific a very internal example of that is this this is a level editor where you cannot use the mouse to navigate the camera the menu on the left with the angles and coordinates you have to press those buttons to move the camera around some are out there a person said you can build level with this there's no need to spend programming time on extra features and they're technically rights technically but you would develop this tool further or make a different one this is very on the nose example of course but they're these things like happening everywhere especially with in-house tools let's take a look at string so quickly at its rain in any shape we might need cool so in hammer we call it displacements in this case we select a face of a brush and I'ma create a displacement of it the non displacement side of the brush are then no longer in use but we still make them appear we can then quickly still a place and copy the displacements as they're handled just like regular brushes so our tool use our flow stays

the same we can then edit the terrain by pushing and pulling and if a gap appears and the brush is aligned we can quickly so a section so that no holes up here and we can keep on everything but if you don't want to add more faces due to displacement we make them appear select them and we can convert them to displacements and again there's a whole account so we select them and weeks and we saw the gap we can also still edit the brush like we did earlier with a vertex tool so we can create overhand cliffs or even caves with this kind of terrain system let's take a look at unreal now real has many many many many options for effort strain and once we've placed it we have a huge variety of tools to work with so many effects that we don't have time to cover them all we can generate roads apply height maps whose splines copy sections of height and paste them over for a large swaths of terrain this is very useful however we do not have as minut control as we did in a hammer we cannot create fifth cliffs or caves and we cannot sew together terrain like we would like to link so we have to cover that up with models along the lines which might not look as pretty let's take a look at unity our unity train we cannot see the size and we do have a selection of

brushes to choose from though so if you're specifically looking to draw like a star-shaped mountain trash this really helps however again we do not have as much minut control we cannot create cliffs for caves so what do we learn here well this is not an easy one to find a one-play takeaway for there is a large difference in small terrains which is large terrain tools for example for example hammer allows for any kind of shape of terrain and has minut control but it's time consuming to a large terrain and it does not allow for height maps or direct texture maps as we have to draw everything on thought is also engine related and while real also allows for quick high detection labs the cliffs and caves cannot be made it seems to be a trade-off between complexity and speed with a system that would have to have both be best but I haven't seen anything like that yet I'm still wondering why sometime in the past we decided we didn't need cliffs or caves anymore and settle with using models to cross them all up I mean just increase the workload for artists instead of laying in a designer to deal with a problem so look at your game look at what it needs and make sure that what you need is what the editor allows the level designer automatically if necessary so they can stay in their flow I really good if you want to hear more about this take a look at the halo 2 anniversary talk from GDC

2015 by Michael Pavlovich as you also see here on the slide avoid rocket-powered traveling deep skilled workers doing skilled work avoid menial process tasks fatigue this again remember this graph these couple of extra edge actions really add something oops and remember this graph fatigue happens if we reach one of the top or bottom sections we need to stay in the middle and by me by fatigue I mean this kind of thing physical energy mental energy a psychological energy if physical energy runs out we're going to be uncomfortable I want to lie down if mental energy runs out because we have to deal with so many things at the same time we lose creativity and if we remove some of these mental hoops to jump through it can save fatigue over long development times and psychological energy if we ever continually have to do after for example start and we start to editor every time to check something personal changes any person will slowly start to lose their minds and they can't work they're physically mentally fine but they cannot work anymore small things that drain this quickly I like your wife I constantly dropping out like some of you probably experiencing here at UDC it's very annoying and sure you can keep on working but it's annoying

that noise that slowly seeps into your brain overtime until you can't focus on me anymore and your your creativity is lost I mean is it worth people getting sick and staying home or for these kinds of things if they can't be fixed because again just because the pipeline is functional doesn't mean that pipeline is done all right a little bit next thing texturing so we want to find available textures quickly and texture basic and complex geometry quickly and we texture large sectors of math quickly accurately for when we iterate so let's look at hammer we can look at a texture browser and we can use shortcuts to search through the names of textures for example we type in wall and we just scroll through and we can try and find something this is not really kind of really nice so what if for example we want to look for a green wall so we type in wall green and there's no results okay maybe what if we typed green wall nope also no results what about like concrete wall does that work okay yeah if we see concrete walls okay so we can take a look through them let's try like just look around and hey there's a green wall but the name is completely different to what we expect so we have to remember every single name

of these textures because we're going to be busy more with our minds remembering names or scrolling from these textures not actually focusing on the level I mean there's ways to create tags for these textures but you would have to manually enter them for each material in the files which requires to get out of the editor and out of the zone now with the textures like that we simply right-click on faces to put the texture on them so if I face next to it is selected it also retains the UV and it's house very smooth in quickly I mean even on complex geometries such as cylinders or arches there's no seams anywhere and there's no stretching beautiful alright our wheel okay so this texture searching system in a real house has the same name convention issue you would have to remember every single name to make sure we find the correct kind of texture what is a lot faster though is the collection system we can create names collections and then drag assets in there so if we click on the collections we see everything that is in there the same asset can be in multiple collection so as it makes a bit faster to find the correct assets we need if

this system is not like up by developers it can really speed up having to find models as all the keywords are visually laid out and set regardless of the model names although our huge game is you again run into the problem of having to scroll through a list of collections to apply textures we can click and drag or we can all click however 2uv the faces we would have to do so manually so for example looking at this box there's a visible seam okay you want to get rid of this seam but all we can do is change these numbers to sort of like really try a lot to get it in shape which takes a lot of time so especially a large complex on complex geometry such as this curves there it becomes very time-consuming process to texture it and make it look nice and tiled we can see we can easily see the seams let's take a look at 3ds max now strange 3ds max we have a system of with a list of icons and we create materials per scene we can then apply the textures by clicking a button we can then either decide to UV which means metally setting everything right like we saw an unreal we just like push buttons around and like numbers and hope it works or we can side to unwrap which is a very time-consuming process not on this cube

specifically but if we have complex geometry it's gonna take a while so yes we can UV it perfectly but it will take a long time to do so so what do you learn here well when it comes to texturing hammer comes out on top when it comes to applying even on a very complex geometry with seamless transfers from face to face being achieved by clicking instead of fiddling with menus voter menu is still there in case it is necessary to work with but unreal affording you have faster systems for finding specific textures especially on larger games and databases as with hammer we would have to either make a very large file name to include all the specifics or remember every single name available much like what we saw earlier with menus if you make it needlessly complicated to find something we might never use it even though it might be very useful the same goes for textures we need to make sure we can place them fast and add them fast while staying in his own this is extremely worthwhile and if someone tells me to build the Mona Lisa in Excel and I object explaining it takes a tremendous amount of time to texture it and it's very slow to edit later on the reply I get should not be like oh just keep on using it like the rest of us we will you will get used to it or even worse a good craftsman never blames his tools just because it's

possible for someone to build a model easy in Excel doesn't mean the next big game Triple A or Indy doesn't matter will make his textures in Excel so lighting what are we looking for here if you want to play slice quickly change the Sonics quickly and quickly see what they look like sadly this is also very much related to the engine so not everything here is purely you actual ated let's take a look at hammer so we can place basic lights as a directional spot point asana etc and we can then edit the color and intensity of that light we don't see what the actual light looks like we could chase a fall-off of the light and get an idea of how far it goes but we still do not see what the light looks like if we place a spot we get a visibility column that showcases where the light will go and what color it is will be again do not actually see what the light will look like to see what it looks like we'd have to compile the map and on a small map this is nice and fast but for a large light later stages of development you would need either a beast of a machine or a long time to see even small edits let's take a look at unreal and I will be again have a basic choice of basic lights among place then we instantly get an indication what will look like in game you can also also toggle the

View window to a game view making it so you can instantly see what's in a scene without all the editor icons we can also bake and compile this for a final view if we want to but we get a good idea what the light looks like right away for spots we also still have the cone so we have a better idea but any movement and color is also instantly shown let's take a look at the creation kit on the Left we have a huge list of lights we can choose from these range from spots glows fire torches campfires bonfires anything a large variety of presets choices are available and at new ones of this or edit an existing one there is a nice insisting system here to where if we change the light and this big list and any of those lights are in a scene somewhere else they also all change automatically which can save time of a huge project like Skyrim is if you open up a preview window though we cannot see what the light looks like because there's nothing to bounce off off so we have to click and drag it into the scene to see what it looks like which is a bit time in action intensive we also have instant light visibility which could also toggle on enough and to change light settings we all can also click on the lights to go into a menu

but that menu has tabs it has many many many tabs so we have to find the right one and then we can edit the specific variable you would want to as you can probably guess that's pretty slow and it takes us out of a flow of work there are a lot of options that's great but it's going but going through them I having to click many times it's gonna take us out of zone now you might say go so just drag to make the window bigger and the tabs will be more widespread across the screen but you can't this window menu kind of mean it cannot be made bigger or smaller it's very very time intensive and not undulated this is just a UI issue let's take a look at 3ds max as we just next again we have a basic choice of lights a visible corn and instant lighting visibility we can quickly and actually change the light settings it's seems to be very WYSIWYG but of course 3ds max we're gonna have to port it to our engine so we don't really know if it's one-to-one to in-game lighting okay so what do we learn here well in this case unreal force pretty damn good and unity' is very similar to that where we both have live lighting and screen creation kit has a lot more options which is nice but to get through them or just access the basic ones requires a lot of time and clicking having a huge

preset list a choose from can save time especially over large projects and visible guidelines help a lot and of course live lighting is the absolute best time saver ever being able to compile for better results later is nice but seeing what you're doing instantly visually helps a lot however this is all very engine dependent as well and so having a lot of choice is great but make sure the menus do not take up too much time and effort to use yes time and effort from many UX menus really be that detrimental a really great real life example this is what Adam Savage 2x mythbuster did with his workshop Adam Savage removed as many draws from his workshop so that everything has as much instant access as possible by looking at foster workshop you can see where a particular tool is grab it immediately when walking towards it everything that's in a drawer will slowly disappear and not be used anymore there are so many things that your mind can think of if you just see it if it's linear whew but sadly just a human problem so the same goes for menus and editors if there's a menu in a menu in a drop-down menu it will take three clicks to finally be used and that's so non visual that whatever is in that menu will probably never be used anyway of course for complex systems and menu is good to have especially when it comes to multiple variable settings but for

simple things such as changing snaps it's time consuming to have to go through a menu every time there are better ways of doing this take for example a look at the compared the menus on lists in text with the universal uy of wow yes you can click through the spell book and read everything if you want to but in game you can just hover over just click icons all the time there's so many abilities but there's Universal icon structure that everyone understands I mean that 10 million people playing this and they understand the icons and it's nice for them to use so having a giant amount of icons the screen isn't a bad thing it's a lot better than that having all the icons and having a screen full of text that you can stay have to read through and add the ability to put the icons in the position you want them and something you have def setting up their work though the way they want it there's no menus needed I mean again they're still spell but if you want to read everything but everything you need is right there and that's not the only problem with menus there's also another many of you especially programmers already know this comic there's a common problem where a programmer is disrupted by someone coming into our office and saying one thing while they were really busy with a really complex issue and it all disappears into a black hole due to the interruption the same exact thing can happen when a level designer is

disrupted by having to search through five menus and three dropdowns just as much as a game play or a narrative designer is disrupted by having their images on Microsoft Word shift all over the place and making what should be a simple edit this kind of losing flow losing a bit of in a zone can have huge impacts if the editor has so many menus that needs to be accessed all the time I'll be almost impossible for the brain to reset zone state there's a create a space for timer relaxation and we can do anything we like and focus on a problem at hand we generate better solutions if I mean flow thinking of creative and awesome solutions for difficult problems an arts scripting design anything and so only I need to click through five tabs it'd be a cool thing I thought about my intention and relaxation is gone not because I want it's deep but because I'm a human being that is taken out of flow by clicking five tabs and I'll be out and talking about suffering by the way the brightness of the editor also affects the developer I mean looking at a matter of 12 hours a day can make your eyes feel painful many people already use flux or similar software to help keeping our eyes from suffering over 60 hour work weeks this gift isn't really nice in your eyes is it exactly your eyes constantly focusing or refocusing is painful so instead dark backgrounds are

much easier on the eyes especially in Kron times and crunch times and at night this is a super simple thing that can save the eyes of sanity of your developers keep it keeping it dark with the right amount of highlights feels much better on the eyes or at least having an option to turn on the dark UI for the people that need it can really help here so let's go to importing assets what do we need here well quickly get anything into the editor cool let's take a look at how my hammer does it so some of you of users probably already know how difficult this is I don't have a video of it as it would take too long to showcase the full process in short if you want to do it in a less painful way than using the first party tools which require you to use a command prompt window to search for a script file to compile your model then you have to use third-party tools found on the internet and those tools might be updated to the latest version of Mac's Photoshop and Maya and they might not be and if something breaks or gives errors you can only hope someone else on the internet has found a solution or else you're out of luck so you have to go through this time-consuming process to get any acid in game so making modular assets for source and I adapted them can make almost can then can makes almost impossible four levels are to get into the zone in the end you'll have to close

and open about three to four piece of different different pieces of software and there are mods out there like award-winning mods for source that did not include fantastic assets that were already finished as it was too complicated to get them into the engine and that's just a shame let's take a look at unreal we click the import button and select a model or we can click and drag a model in this texture is the texture is automatically ordered as well it's nice visual fast there's also an even faster way we can directly say from your modeling software into a folder and on with full automatically grabs it imports anything in the folder so yeah really fast on re4 also automatically is a preview icon for the model which helps for searching with the assets sigelei gonna do unity about the same as unreal we can click and drag a model in although the skill might be a bit office we don't really know any of the measurements because again we're just working with scale all right let's take a look at the creation kit again a video of this process would take too long the processes again with third-party tools so if anything breaks your Google searching skills would have to be in good shape and again the third-party tools may not be usable with the current version of software I tried to put something in the

creation kit with 3ds max 2016 couldn't do it have to download an older version to make it happen let's take a look at what we learned here so of course welcome test them I have way better first party systems in house that only they use and but sadly we can't look at those and learn from them so very obviously but still worth pointing out clicking and drying is very fast and a director we load system where any model and the directory is loaded automatically it is also very nice and fast as it skips even a clicking and dragging and an automatic import for textures affected models is fantastic as it skips another step where bugs or errors could pop up if it were done manually an automatic icon creation for searching purposes is awesome this makes it easier to work with the content once it's important especially when we're talking about a large game or mod and these kinds of problems if never solved can really snowball out of proportion good and bad UX has huge impacts I mean there's pretty crazy differences here and make a huge effects over time and of course these are kind of loose pile of good UX is file of value X pile of goo UX escape we've got creative fall from solving faster development time which creates quality

content which creates happy developers because they know that content is good or bad which create more query or creative problem solving and there's bad new works there's one way problem solving slower development time inferior contents which creates unhappy developers because we know when our contents bad and which creates more one of my problem solving so there's really a lot of stuff that can happen if we give the buy the power tool of designers to change these things and buy power I mean the ability to do so within the producing time how do you grant them just disability by designing editors with good UX so don't believe me let's grab an example we want to solve a signposting issue so we have two ways of doing this either a level designer change the geometry import some asset changes the lighting and play test in editor to see if the new signposting works or the programmers have to create a new floating aero system the artists have to create a new good-looking era for the system the producer has fine time for these groups communicate effectively so no time is lost and queue has a test for the new era system and the only difference between these two solutions is whether the level designer has the editing power to change those things themselves I mean low designer can bring end up to working levels and then the other

developers can make sure that is shippable quality which brings down the number of total iterations if it takes very long to implement a level fix sorts made difficult or bad with that value editor UI you'll have no choice but to add quest markers and when Tessa feedback says is difficult to get somewhere as it's the most production safe way of handling that feedback so a set of levels being iterated new functions are being added to solve these gaps and this is not due to dead are being dysfunctional not to the end being bad not to the developers being bad but only due to the editor UX being bad I mean look at the huge amount of time and effort saved with good editor UX however there is a direct correlation between a tool being more revolutionary and a difficulty of getting people behind that process simply due to the perceived risk and there are many reasons for this but the biggest one of course being like we discussed before the level designer asks but the producer and forum are have to do that's not a nice trade now some companies cut out the middleman here they tend to hire level designers who can also program however those availables may be hard to find or very expensive so instead all I could say is that I hope with this presentation it becomes more clear that level designers do not ask solely for

themselves but also for the sake of the entire game because again they tend to be one of the key links between the game design and the actual product at the user place so if you liked this talk or its contents don't shy away from showing it to your entire team or just the programmer sort of level designers everyone is impacted by these editors and flow ok let's look at placing assets so we want to quickly play stuff and basically add reposition quickly above the large and small volumes ok let's take a look so we can hammer we can select a variety of prop entities such as dynamic physics static etc we then place it and then we have to find a model for it we have to do this by keywords so again we run through the same issues as we did with textures either we have to scroll through a big list or we have to remember all the names and that might also be a model in there you might not expect like if we search for door we might also find something called an indoor bench and hammer does allow for a very quick way to copy and paste for example getting a prophecy perfectly on the ground takes a bit of filling if you move manually but if we copy and paste it it pays exactly to where we point with the mouse and a

model is perfectly set on the ground this can save time when it comes to detailing a map and we're placing many of the same props as we don't need to grab the movement or and or type in coordinates an interesting system amer also allows for is instances replace an instance of an T and then you tie a map file to it the entity then shows what is in that map file we can then copy and paste multiple of these entities around and if we then go into the original map map file we tied to it we can make changes to it because this go to their map file and there we see like there's a light and a couple of entities and a brush piece of geometry ok cool so you make changes here we go back every automatically changes so if I have a complex light set up a geometry setup or select some kind of entities up we can easily change all of them in one minute let's take a look at unreal and I will we simply click and drag from the model browser which is a bit faster and we can still change the model if you'd like to but we have to use the pivot to move the model and if we copy and paste we have to continually drag out the next model for to the correct position and we of course have the same keyword searching system go again the collection system helps here to take a look at unity you

can see we have a similar system to run wheel but we click and drag a model into the scene and to copy in place we need to duplicate click and drag again we can search through keywords and tags let's look a look at a crazy kit to find assets in equation kit we have to go through many different directories to find the correct models to work with due to the entire geometry being made out of assets there are no visual icons present and again we can search through keywords only there's a preview window we can make appear but it shows the assets one after another also like we saw in hammer which is slow and dealing with the large amount of assets available in this case although switching out models is quite fast if you need to do though do so I mean simply adding icons here instead of just text can save a huge amount of time because we can quickly and one glass and one glance see exactly what we need instead of having to go through this and sort of just finding that exact right thing that we need so what do we learn here well icons searching is much faster than text searching as it provides that at a glance overview in a collection or tagging system is faster than a text system especially for large asset databases and positional copying what

copying where the user is pointing is a bit faster than dragging or typing coordinates especially when working with large levels and complex geometry an instant thing or prefabs are very useful and placing many of the same assets or groups of assets they spent up to speed up the iteration process as less time has to be spent doing the same thing over and over and everything changes immediately inside editors though there are also ways of making the process of finding SS even faster for example the Team Fortress 2 community started making prop libraries like a bejeweled snark dude it did this which is a level with all the assets of the game in them sorted by kind rocks with rocks 5 smooth pipes boxes with boxes etc in this way no matter what the name of the model file is it is visually immediately apparent what the choices are and we can simply copy and paste them over it saves a lot design I have to go through text lists one by one the exact same thing was also released by valve on the latest operation for counter-strike so let's say I want to change this brush with a model so I go into the zoo that's all created and I get an immediate visual overview of all my choices I don't need to remember any names and always know exactly what my choices are

even between high and low poly models now this system is slower when the level designer working on the level knows all the SS by name but especially on bringing on new developers or really large large systems this is way way better like I can find and having loved design and switch between levels it provides a way of getting acquainted with all the options and it's like a garden to get inspiration from I can then find a model and then I can then just paste it over if I ever need to change it I can then do it by name if I'd like to so I just click on it paste it move it there and remove the brush and I'm done let's tick so let's play a game here called name that model and I want you all to play lon just yell loudly so I can hear you okay so what is this model called any suggestions sorry gates it's called a meter so if you haven't typed in meter you can't find out model okay let's do this one what would this be called suggestions sorry fence fence it's called a grill you can see that it sort of makes sense but you would never check that end to find it let's do another one

what's this one called bracket nice job it's called the prison brackets let's look at this one but it's this one called end rail lever it's called a scaffolding building X supports okay final one what would this be called rails rails yeah well think rails it's called a run straights anyway you get the idea so finding models based on names is just not good for flow especially when working with bilingual teams and if you're outsourcing outsourcing art because you just kind of have trouble with that okay final thing playtesting okay so what I want to do quickly get in another game and play that stuff cool how does hammer do this well first me to place a spawn points and then we have to compile the level and this can take five minutes or up to an hour depending on many different factors and we also need to remember the location of the spawn point and make sure we move it around if we want to plate as a specific section of the map otherwise we may waste time running through the map to find the right location again

one more tiny thing we have to remember instead of getting into the zone of thinking how can I make this level the best it can be my brain is not focusing on like okay so where's that spawn because I no need to forget it otherwise I'll facepalm myself an hour lose time it takes me out of the zone okay let's look take a look at our wheel and our wheel we have to right-click anywhere and press play here just no need to move spawn or around or wait for a game on map to load we just click and play there's no need to compile either I mean yes we can if we want to but there's no requirement to do so take a look at unity now press play and whatever is programmed to be the main camera play your character or whatever this you made will start playing this is fairly fast and there's a very nice pause and frame-by-frame system as well if anything goes wrong unexpectedly it's quite simple to pause and then immediately fly around to look up and wrong and everything stays put it's also possible to adapt the scene while paused for example you can see I moved around a bit further here and come over it even further here this pause added system makes for extremely fast testing and iteration of changes let's take a look at the creation kit to play this an equation kit a spawn location needs to be moved around to the correct place and a level needs to be saved and the game

needs to be started with the right content enabled the player can then spawn in to the level using a console well if you don't wish to edit the level and tab in the sea changes you can't you will have to unload and reload the game every time in edit this game so you have to completely quit it and completely start it up again this can be very costly on time especially when it comes to smaller changes and the speed of loading and 3ds max well you can't they're probably currently working on something but right now and you can't play anything in 3ds max okay so having an editor check so we don't have to start up the game saves a lot of time and we can focus on the level instead of having to wait otherwise it's nice if we can keep the game and the editor running at the same time so we don't have to reload either while I'm in between changes and clicking allocation to play is very nice as it means I don't have to get thinking about where the spawn location is or any other entities that are tied to it and when you had no one have to move them around we can focus on a problem at hand and of course flying and editing during past time is incredible it really speeds up the iteration process as problems can quickly be found and adapted without having to go through a playtesting pipeline though of course all these issues are also engine dependant so it's difficult to implement this but it might be worth it over large and longer projects depending on what you're

working on so those are all the topics we've covered it in I hope this has been useful to you and I just want to reiterate the most important points look at other games for inspiration and look at other editor for inspiration this may seemed obvious but f we saw through this presentation many solutions already present and they just haven't been implemented main point button yet in other editors an interesting design comes from iteration and trying things out if the editor does not facilitate this and the design of the game will stagnate and really tiny issues can have really huge impacts over long projects and there are many more companies doing these kinds of things already but they get rarely shared and usually stay in house under NDA so if someone does talk about them just grab an and shake all the information out of them you could possibly have because it's really really valuable and just because a pipeline is functional doesn't mean that pipeline is done you actually my metaphor games as much as matters for editors again just remember like a 45 hour game quickly past three hour long editor and not work done again like if and don't don't answer someone's cries for help with

just keep on using it like the rest of us or you will get used to it or a good craftsman never blames his tools and fatigue happens it's a real thing so watch out for this and that is the fault of whoever designed an editor if the user just consistently does something wrong and create a space for creativity in flow being in the zone it reflects in our work and remember the spirals of good and bad UX and the butterfly effects that they can cause and huge amounts of time and effort can be saved to just who just threw you X so when shorts saying a good craftsman never blames his tool is detrimental to your game your developers and your customers should developers be smart enough to know what tools to pick and what to what to use for which tasks yes should developers be smart enough to realize when their tools are holding back the game's potential yes thank you very much I would like these thank these people for all the help they gave me and I want

to thank these editors for in fisting like it's awesome that we can all create stuff also at home for mothers these are the sources that I used and are there any questions I think we have five minutes left is that correct yes cool amen so I think we can all agree that searching a thing for NASA by name is terrible but um do you have any ideas about solving that problem like tagging systems that I don't require people to figure out everything about their asset some other person might search the zoo thing is still the best thing that I've seen so far and what I showed in the video was only models in this case but actually I didn't show another party level which valve also made which is a texture section so you have this you twelve textures with all the shaders on them you just look around them and go hey that's the kind of red shader I want you just right there right I remember tags are names for you know like sunset overdrive we had over 200 thousand assets and creating just that creating the zoo would have taken a bit of a full time job so is there do

you know of anything that like could automate that yes well there is a system which is now really aged not used anymore which was done by valve also like a long time ago which is what they call like an entity sprawl I think it is so we still click on the button and it basically spawns every single entity entity that it has on the entire map like in sections so you sort of know where everything is now if you've named things moderately like goods you can develop a system like okay everything that has the word wooden hit goes to this section of the map anything that has a word type in it goes in this section of the map I haven't seen anyone else do that yet though yeah so it's not really a salt issue yet any other questions no well if you have any questions later you can also grab still grab straw waffle or find me in a wrapper boom thank you very much