Level Design Workshop: Architecture in Level Design

[Music] hello everyone if you could please turn off any mobile phones and noisemakers before we get started that'd be great but I think it's time to get into my talk which is architecture for level design I'm Claire husking I've got a Master of Architecture and a Bachelors of design in architecture I've written for polygon in the past and I make my own games based on procedural architecture and that kind of thing so what I'm going to talk to you today is about how level designers how architectural design can help level designers achieve their intended mood and add depth to their levels and since I don't know what kind of activities you want to put in your game I'm going to presume that it's not going to be combat necessarily or puzzles or story pickups I'm just going to focus on making individual spaces worthwhile so the first thing I was thinking about when making this talk is what would be most useful to you because architecture covers a lot of different things so what I really want to focus on is the kind of geometry and layout design that level

designers do and how you can use that to kind of emphasize and accentuate materials and all those later stages of the design process so whoops wrong button so basic considerations one of the great qualities that brings mood to space into cities is the typology of cities the typology of cities is the kind of the layout of the city and the pattern that it adopts in response to all the considerations that people have around them so the weather the topology all of that kind of thing but all of these things tend to relate to some basic considerations about space circulation psychological comfort and visual interest so this is from a 1979 study by urbanist William H white called the straight life project they went out and studied and maps how people use public space and

they produced an excellent documentary called the social life of small urban spaces which I'd really recommend watching if you ever want to create a city as part of your level design and what they found is that when people are standing or sitting they tend to fall back towards the edges faces like to put their back against something safe and they like to look outwards towards a vista and interestingly the most interesting vista for them to watch is other people and we also know that when people want to go between two places they go in a straight line so one of the most successful urban spaces has a main directory between two parts which has people all walking along it and then at the edges it has somewhere for people to sit and then behind that it has a defined edge and people will come there and like sit there and watch the world go by and if it's a less linear space say more of a plaza or a park you can put other activities as a central focus like a fountain or an ice-cream cart or a bowl game etc and people will take the focus if there's something for them to do and this typology tends to repeat itself at all levels so a room is organized around the focus those rooms organized around a focus houses cluster

around a street and or a square and plazas and cities it's like kind of organized around the center of the city and you can break up all of those into small units of implied rooms and that kind of thing so if you're looking to make like passively interesting space in a game that functions like real spaces do you can use this and so if the player is a spectator they go to the edge and if they're a traveler and activator they go to the center Architects tend to summarize these factors into the idea of positive and negative space so positive space is this well-defined space that has like an organizing focal point and negative spaces to be left over space ill-defined often concave space with no real organizing focal point or axis and roughly people feel comfortable in positive space and they tend to move on and feel a bit uncomfortable in the negative space so this also works in video games so here's a good example from The Walking Dead where negative space is used to kind of disconcert the player it's not just the emptiness in

the abandoned cars and the sickly green tinge like the art direction that's producing the sense of desolate us here there's this amorphous ill-defined space in the suburbs that creates a sense of unease and that you want to move along from and the urban design has no direction to it and that's perfect because this is a particular part in this game where the player doesn't know where they should go so this is kind of showing you that it's like the layout itself creates the mood it's not just the accoutrements of home which already feel very familiar it's kind of the space that you move through it's able to set a lot of the tone so in order to do this William talked a little bit about how architects use the idea of a party which is a diagram that shows the organization of space and it can show just the physical layout of space but it can also express kind of the tonal layout of space and what approach you'll be using so this is by Peterson thought it's the party for the thermal baths at Val's which is generally regarded as a modern

masterpiece of mood and tone so it establishes the original diagram establishes the sense of heaviness that he's trying to achieve which translates into these rooms that designed as like solid blocks that have been inserted into the plan and then smallest faces carved out of them so the layout itself has a solidity to it that is then reinforced by the the way the materials have been treated and the layout itself allows the materials to be treated like that so party helps you consider if you want the qualities of your space to be like boxy or amalgamations or iconic or woven or folded or piled up and the way that affects the way the player interacts with the world and the qualities of space in play so architecture creates meaning through atmosphere rather than symbolism as I was talking before about the focus of the domestic qualities it's not so much

about like you can see that the houses have gabled roofs and that kind of thing it's more about the geometry of the material the texture creating like quite a domestic space that sets the necessary tone for the audience like if that was something you wanted to achieve so here's a really good example this is also by Peterson Thor who is a well known architect he's one the Pritzker Prize which is like the big your Great Architect prize it's a lifetime award for your work he's also one of my favorite architects and so this is brewed class filled chapel this is a chapel first Sheppard's it's in the middle of a field there's no way that you can like put priests in it or put bells or any of that kind of thing to tell you what it's for so how does some Thor use space and like design and that kind of thing to create something that

feels like suitably sacred and draw people to it so firstly rather than create a steeple and a pitched roof or the cross on top it uses this warm and mysterious form to attract people I think this was something the journey understood really well is it's one thing to make it really clearly a player has to go but it's another thing to make it really inviting and in order to like get people to go somewhere as an architect I can't use horror or urgency I can't damned all their loved ones will give people FET requests so some thoughts uses a strategy that's much more about sneak peeks and arousing curiosity about what's up there and how the next corner might change your perceptions so this curiosity here is created by the tapered corners which show the mass and make it obvious that there's something in there inviting us to circle around it's very relative but in our culture this kind of simple unit with shallow angles can have a kind of arcane connotations you can see this used in like other chapels but also video games that are trying to like go for something that feels quite otherworldly it's just

yeah this put it in the Rothko Chapel it's used to kind of generate this Platonic ideal of worship that is transcendent across different religions and so yet these geometries kind of hint at other worldliness so similarly it leaves off decorative detail and while detail is used a lot in games to do environmental storytelling into clue players into what era in class you're well versed in leaving it off like wires like creates the ambiguity and the mystery here that's drawing you towards it because you don't know how modern or ancient it might be what cultural group it belongs to just yet and likewise the soft indents and text very beautifully human scale and that kind of plays into like having left all that off and having used quite simple forms it allows that to shine all right rather than use a more traditional Church or cathedrals or some places almost this sci-fi door and in a nice piece of attention directing like rather

than using kind of the red flashing lights where the detail kind of shows you where the door is the door is actually pointing you towards the detail because like this is not about like knowing where the next place to go is it's about taking in each point along your journey and so so far it's used kind of the position the color the shaping the formal arrangement of the dots on the outside to express it there's something here it contains something and that is Christian and it's within the next step is that you step inside and it's full of stars this is probably these are all the little holes that are left over when you build something out of concrete you have to put tires through between both sides of the formwork and some Thoreau has chosen to leave them open to create this kind of the sense of infinite space and like deep kind of meaningfulness it's

probably the most literally holy chapel in the world sorry and as you can see there's not a whole lot of traditional Christian chapel symbolism no boats no fish no doves instead the architecture itself points directly at the sky the sloping fluted walls carry the eye upwards and the dark starry interior suggests an endless universe and you can feel like the thick heavy walls and poured iron covering on the floor which you might be able to see that create the sense of like meditative way teenis that settles the space and encourages you to dwell so the form making itself like yes it accentuates all these materials that have come in and it creates an experience for the player like all on its own so the card space cannot be taken from one vantage point it's impossible to stand back and find one position where the whole space is framed it pushes you to close so you have to actively

construct a mental image of the space and it can only exist inside your head and this itself kind of gestures towards the ephemeral and like the idea of something that exists that exists on a different plane and so yes so this is how architecture can create a sense of space without necessarily without necessarily all the symbolism and there are games that do this really well too so for instance if you look at the way that the idea of home is portrayed and last of us in Soma you might notice the first level layouts I've only got the last of us here importantly you might notice that the first level layouts rectilinear not much interpenetration or variation in the volumes pretty clean simple familiar generic but importantly that sense of order is echoed in the way the architecture is constructed we have these solid joints simple cornices simple skirtings or very matte so thematically it establishes a locus of order that acts as a contrast the oncoming disorder which will be characterized by a very different set of tectonics that of an crustacean and so

here you can see bit like both the level layouts and like the world itself become like these very melded level layers and material these knobblies surfaces this rust and dirt and moss and mold and at this yes at the same time the level layouts become less rectilinear like the it's used to kind of highlight this art and so this is a great example where the construction of the architecture occurs the level design how the mood is established both in organizing principle and material expression in space in a way that has storytelling purpose so creating specific characters in the space here two things have to evolve at once since the way you shape space can emphasize materials and simultaneously the perception of material qualities that is weight steadiness complexity etc influences the perception of shape and scale and proportion the kinds of things that you have control over and shaping your levels so this is an example by zaha hadid of how the layout of the

space is helping to highlight the tonal qualities of material Hadid is also a Pritzker Prize winner also a major worldwide architect also a favorite of mine she mainly works in digital architecture she does a lot of procedural stuff and works a lot in concrete not so much in steel which is why this one is kind of interesting sir so here to create an appropriate atmosphere for the activity of diving she's designed a set of boards that kind of feel fill you with the feeling of lightness even before you step off the edge level design wise it's been separated into these individual podiums like creating a journey that requires you to step out onto these suspended stairways and it's not like traditional diving boards which are joined into this like central column and you don't get to actually step out and experience that space the space has also been cleared of other distracting elements and the ceiling is quite high and the walls are without many right angles so it creates

this sense of smoothness moreover at the same level Sensibility layout sensibility is echoed in the way the materials have been treated and shaved so the steel forms these light fine railings you can see they return in these curved details that are set apart from the platform the concrete has been shaped to these very plastic forms so the mood of the layout in the mood of the materials in the way they meet each other all have the sensibility and the choice that saw has made has allowed this to occur so there are games that do this really well where the spatial qualities create tone and emphasize materiality the first two by shopkins where the construction details these chunky pieces really solidly welded together and if you look at the level map so you can see chunky spaces with like heavy-duty connections between them and this makes sense because it's a heavy place weighed down by a lot of atmospheric pressure so yeah it's the actual layout of the space and how you move through it and you can't just reskin this and expect it to work really well in all fictions so BioShock

Infinite takes a similar Sensibility but again it still feels way too even though it's meant to be in the sky so in architecture you would look more for using details of material rather than like narrative fiction and all just create a sense of lightness so this is the Holman house Beiderbecke work trackers which there are details like there are reflective mirrors on the columns the lights seem to fall through this from the sky through holes in the ceiling and the windows have continued down past the edge of the floor so there's a sense that the whole building is kind of floating even when you're in it there are games that do this well so Mirror's Edge is trying to create a really light feeling that you're traversing things and they aren't very what burnt well that's right they're not welded together but sort of far suit apart sharply-defined the space around you almost seems free-floating subtracted boxy elements

insert themselves into your path and fragmented space still is used not just because it's visually light but it creates these fences that are blades jutting up into the level and that moves the camera up and down very quickly and enhances that sense that you're up in the air and you're kind of floating around so this geometry fragments and in sizes the space and you can see that the art direction has this time is the sharpness to every joint and that these level design choices allow that to be shown you can talk about that it's not just a visual metaphor the it's the difference between the player working their way from master master master nurse versus hopping around a fragments in space I know obviously the shop game is the shooters and Mirror's Edge is a traversal game and Olympic diving is something totally different altogether but I still think it's worth like considering how you adapt these principles from one game to another so one of the last things I want to sort of talk about is that for me the

consideration of architecture in games isn't about like use does your door you work the way a real door does it's a question of like does because real architecture doesn't look very realistic always either it's a question for me of like space and material not necessarily realism sometimes it feels like games aim for a kind of solidity like I need to fight the virtual nasai k-- it's a question more about consistency and that's kind of what we're trying to do here I think a big part of what many what makes architecture captivating is that by compositing disparate materials with the same tonal goal you kind of reveal the truth about like the universe and its latent possibilities and I think that's true of games as well because when you show how all these different layers can achieve the same thing you kind of tell something about the space that you're creating and the kind of like vision that you have and so when I say detail I don't mean something out of detail

magazine it's not whether it's familiar it's like is the massing doing something besides separating one bit of content from another how do you think about the way you're using mass is it a solid wall with hollow with holes punched in a dividing plane that's been thickened in places a frame within a space what metaphor do you use to kind of express what you're trying to achieve at that level I want you to use form the way that I use form to create identity to emphasize material and to create a coherent whole that has a distinct atmosphere thank you [Applause] [Applause] questions hi I was wondering how you feel about repetition and architecture in games such as modular levels level design and using the same concrete

texture for every piece of concrete in one game I have interesting feelings about that because I work a lot in procedural son so for me like repetition is yeah it's a device that you can use within that and that's like one parameter that you can set and it gives it can be used for familiarity or like as you see as I'm sure you're criticizing well that it can be used for boredom and like it can cause boredom and that kind of thing or yeah but yeah I'm wondering how you think it can be used usefully like to to the best advantage yeah for sure because it depends like what you're trying to create like if you want something to constantly echo something throughout your game then it can do that if you think about cities that have like really consistent architecture where it's often like everywhere throughout it creates a sense that the people in that world had

a particular material that they had to use and that they evolved to use that in a particular way and that they've gone about it and just done it everywhere if you go to like Santorini it's really look like the Greek island it's very like that like every house is constructed in the same way because they only had like limited options so that's kind of to me that's what they would say architectural II about a world fit yes thank you all right okay thank Dean thanks for your time you're saying your you want to apply consistency and so forth so you're saying that normally and video games right now where do you would you think that we're a bit limited our way of thinking of designing in terms of architecture that we should apply more of the current architectural field towards game design I'm not sure about that it was more that I've never heard it expressed in this way like I can

definitely see it happening in games so I don't have people are limited but I don't know if there's the design emphasis on that because there's very much like particularly in games that have a very best like a very strong tradition of level design for particular purposes that's less experiential so maybe like for more experiential games this is more relevant yeah yes hi you mentioned the documentary about City Planning yeah oh the social life is small urban spaces thank you very much yeah it's really really good you should watch it yeah anybody else know okay all right everyone 440 is next talk thank you very much for coming [Applause]