The Importance of Nothing: Using Negative Space in Level Design

[Music] um as as you all probably coming back from lunch and have a little bit of a food coma I wanted to re-engage your brains a little bit uh with some highly complicated math so as soon as you know the answer to the following problem please feel free to yell it out as loud as you like I want the people next door to hear this is hard 12 minus 5 that's kind of pitiful but a few people got seven all right so that's good so we'll step it up a little bit feel free to to jump in here and this one I need you to answer in the proper format so we have three dots minus one dot equals dot two dots very good so people are awake I like this so bonus round answer in the correct format we have Roman numeral 4 minus Roman numeral 4 equals zero not n nothing this seems like a simple concept right you either

have something you don't something is there or it's not but obviously I've misled you a bit here because there is no Roman numeral for zero at a purely philosophical level this is an unsolvable problem and the greatest Minds in history have been unable to resolve it because they couldn't agree on what nothing actually was if you take everything out of a box you're left with a void and that void is theoretically something it has a name it conceptually exists and and in this way nothing has become a thing and this idea of nothing is something is exactly what the Greek and Roman philosophers debated about endlessly because if nothing is something then it can be used as a tool and that's exactly what we do design is about Simplicity it's about reduction and Clarity it's about the importance of nothing so nothing is a tool that we use perhaps unconsciously all the time time

but if we could apply it purposefully then it stands to reason that we could make our maps and our games better and as technology improves we have the ability to add more and more to our games to make them indistinguishable from reality by highlighting every crack every pore on the face every strand of hair every piece of geometry but we often forget to pause and consider the advantages inherent to the Simplicity and Clarity of nothing and a few months ago as we were sitting around the office we had this discussion about level Clarity and it kind of inspired me to go back and revisit some of the basic design principles to take some lessons from the past and see how we might carry them forward into the future now at Epic we've been fortunate enough to have had some successful games and within those games there's one map that really stands out is what is quite possibly our most popular map of all time and that is facing worlds now facing worlds are just CTF face as it's commonly known was a

masterpiece of Simplicity stands out to me as representative of a generation of design techniques that we're kind of starting to stray from it has a really clean use of space visual Clarity and flow and it's all due in large part to its great use of Applied nothingness by way of negative space now the popularity of facing worlds is impressive and humbling really it's if you Google facing worlds you'll get over 37 million hits and I've seen copies remakes refactors Maps inspired by Face by The Hundreds if not the thousands you'll see home brew versions popping up in worms of all places Halo Starcraft Castle Wolfenstein TF2 Minecraft any number of games that allow their players to mod and create as recently as last year PC Gamer did a feature on the map calling it one of the best multiplayer maps ever

just this one fan page that I found randomly on the internet has over two dozen versions available for download I wonder how many of them were able to recapture that same Simplicity and Beauty how many of them tried to update the map Without Really realizing what made it work in the first place because this is something that even we have struggled with in our own internal versions and official updates face has been represented in multiple generations of epics games across multiple versions of the Unreal Engine so we can track how those techniques changed and get a clear in uh understanding of the impact that that had on the history of the map as it evolved so what did make it work to a large degree I'm saying it was negative space now technically speaking negative space is the space where things aren't present or the space between objects and negative space has been used for millennia it's found both in

Aboriginal and Paleolithic cave art in the modern sense you see it being used as a means of intentionally focusing the eye and achieving compositional balance you see it everywhere even today although you may not realize what you're seeing and quite honestly that's kind of the point have you ever noticed that there's a delivery Arrow between the E and the X in the middle of the FedEx logo or NBC's peacock that the World Wildlife federation's panda is actually just collection of shapes it's not actually an animal that there's no s in the USA network logo Disney has even come out with kid-friendly pirate skull t-shirts that don't have scary skulls on them in all of these cases your brain fills in the missing details for you now another common definition of negative space is just removing miscellaneous detail to achieve a national uh Natural Balance that allows your eye to understand and appreciate the the focus of what it's looking at so

combining these various techniques we see negative space being used in game marketing all the time Battlefield League of Legends Halo Call of Duty Assassin's Creed we used it to give Marcus his flaming phoenix wings in Gears of War it was the basis for our entire launch campaign in Gears of War 2 and it serves as the foundation for each and every one of our iconic Crimson Omen logos so it's somewhat ubiquitous in 2D space but what about 3D well design can be defined as a noun it's a plan or a draft but it's also a verb to plan to project or to intend and I love that intent definition because it reallys helps capture how much of design is about emotion and empathy and to me this is one of the Core Concepts of what I'm calling negative space design and

using these techniques to achieve the more commonly discussed uh principles of design which are balance contrast and emphasis now these are all Concepts that we used to keep in mind whenever we built anything we started with a void uh of nothing that ironically was actually conceptually something because the Unreal Engine was subtractive and we had to carve out space into the world from this void and as we subtracted space into this void every polygon was significant you had to balance every cut every shape and purposefully create architecture that emphasized our designs in as simple a manner as possible because technology at the time wasn't really capable of more and getting this right was as much of an art as it was a science and the best designers understood this and you could clearly see it in their work this is one of the reasons that I fell in love with CTF face and why I've always respected Cedric who I don't know if he's here that would be awesome if he was sadly

not uh he is the map's original designer and I've always thought he was one of the industry's best a real master at his craft and Masters have always been those people who understand the relationship between Art and Science look at Leonardo da Vinci considered to be one of the greatest Minds in history painter sculptor mathematician engineer politician anatomist geologist botanist true crossover between Art and Science Now da Vinci expanded on the concept of negative space was something that he called fumado it was a technique which includes the concept of using the AR surrounding space to imply meaning now there's more to spato than just this basic concept but monolisa is a great example of what I'm talking about here focus on her head for a minute it wasn't stencl out with hard lines and then colored in like you would a coloring book instead the shape of her features are actually defined by the

dark spaces of hair and Shadow which also serves to highlight her face as a focal point in the image now this is the opposite of a silhouette and it's a common Technique we use in video games to lure players toward an exit or an important item so in a broader sense using negative space can be defined as using what isn't there and this is a definition which has wide application to 3D space and by extension to both game design and level design if you look at famous structures like the pantheon or the Eiffel Tower their use of shapes and negative space imparts a visual Clarity that gives the eye a focal point and a really easy way to understand the space around them the space that surrounds and defines them and it's no coincidence that if you take these two images and stack them you begin to see the basic framework for the towers and facing Worlds the use of negative space in the original facing Worlds Map intentionally gave the player that VIs visual Clarity that meant more

focus on the gameplay and less focus on trying to figure out the scene the simple well-defined shapes stand out from the background and the tall narrowing Towers anchor the eye to the important gameplay spaces and the players in those spaces can be picked out against their dark backgrounds highlighted suato like Mona Lisa's face now of course this is by no means unique to facing worlds I would actually argue that um all of the most popular Maps across a wide spectrum of games represent Prime examples of good negative space use you can see those same principles that work in Call of Duty on CrossFire Counterstrike in dust Halo in Blood Gulch Quake 3's Longest Yard League of Legends Summoner riff the lens uh the list goes on and on each of these Maps is arguably the most popular map in their respective game and subconsciously or otherwise each of them is enhanced by the use of negative space to Define their visuals and their game

play so before I get too deep on the use of negative space I think it's important to understand why it works and the easiest explanation is just biology our brains are hardwired to understand these kind of Concepts there are some cultures in the Amazon today who really only use three numbers a few a few more and many anything beyond that is considered just to be too Troublesome it's not it's not the complication now that's not to say that they don't understand what nothing is it's actually quite the contrary they think that the concept of nothing is so simple and so Universal it's just not even worth talking about they would consider the debates of the Greek and Roman philosophers is just wasting time on the obvious Alex was a famous African gray parrot and he was known for his cognitive abilities he can communicate shapes sizes materials colors any number of Concepts and not just wrote

memorization he understood that six things was more than three things he could even combine Concepts to create words for things that he hadn't been taught and so when the researcher started teaching him to count he astounded the staff by not only understanding but being able or not only communicating but being able to understand the concept of nothing without anyone ever teaching it to him this is part of our biology this is the way your brain works and this inherent understanding of nothing is one of the most powerful tools that we can use to improve the overall experience of our players you can even see how the opposite of negative space has a dramatic effect on level Clarity if you look at Call of Duty's faela Maps there's so many paths so much detail so much going on that it's just visually overwhelming there's nowhere for your eye to stop and make sense of the scene now gestal Theory tells us how the brain processes information by breaking it down uh or combining

groups of details into larger chunks that are easier to process visual information in particular is processed all at once compared to words and numbers which are processed sequentially now artists take advantage of this technique all the time look up just about any speed painting video and you'll notice that the artists flip their images back and forth and then they'll suddenly zoom in and zoom out and they do this so that they they don't get lost in the details they do it so they can take in the entire image all at once and see how the piece reads or communicates as a whole and the video I'm referencing here is just a random one I pulled off the internet and you can see that just in the space of a second or two the artist moves from painting the fine details in a large image to glancing at the entire image all at once and zooming in and out it's just a blip but that's all it takes because of the way our brains process visual information and a quick flash all at once now of course this isn't a new

technique it wasn't invented by Photoshop users and the LOI version which has been used for centuries is the squint test here's a famous negative space image of a dog if you have trouble seeing squint and the dog will probably come into Focus squinting gives you the broad sense of a scene while minimizing the impact of the finer details this is kind of like an auto gastal simulator now account for this we actually implemented a squint tool in Unreal Engine 3 I don't know exactly who did it I tried to figure it out and I couldn't got wild goose chase but I had this image in my head of a programmer walking into a room full of artists and then all squinting at their scenes and and complaining of headaches so essentially with a click of this button you could blur the frame buffer making the scene in your editor view Port look just as it would as if you were squinting but with less eye strain and since I didn't have everything I wanted to show you today

running an Unreal Engine 3 I was tried to recreate that same squint effect using photoshop's built-in blur filter so here's face and favella side by side and here they are with photoshop's default blur filter to show you what each scene might look like if you were using that s squint to squint tool now if you can imagine yourself moving through these maps in real time your eyes quickly scanning for enemies these blurry images are similar to what your brain would process in a split second and even without stopping to focus on any particular detail you can see that face is still almost completely readable the paths are there the doors the architecture the shapes it would be really simple for your brain to take this entire scene in quickly and make decisions uh quickly in game now by contrast flla has just become a jumble of bleeding colors and the only real distinct feature there is the sky your brain has to struggle a little bit to

interpret the individual details and even though that might happen in a split second that's all it takes to affect your reaction time in combat it slows down that decision-making process because you have to mentally focus and process each detail sequentially rather than taking in the scene as a whole so squinting shrinking blurring these are all really simple techniques that you can use almost at any time to ensure that your foreground and your background work together the foreground and the background if the foreground and the background are fighting for attention then neither's going to win good use of negative space however can focus the player's attention on what you think are the important elements of your scene meaning that you take an active part in the design process that you can actually influence the experience of your players another way the brain works is uh Works through a complicated scene is to break it down into what cognitive scientists call small meaningful

patterns we take groups of objects that are similar and we quickly combine them into a single chunk that's easy to process now I wanted to visualize this process too so leaning on Photoshop one more time I used the pallet knife filter and the pallet knife processes an image taking areas of similar color and combining them into one of the same color just like our brains might do with visual information so again here's face and flla and here they are processed with photoshop's default settings on the pallet knif filter you can see that all the main features of face are still there the pa the doors the assault points everything comes through clearly but by contrast flla becomes an obscure collection of blotches you can't even distinguish the gameplay space from the architecture anymore now this is significant because it says how uh we we affects perception in our Maps an image with well- defined borders is really easy for our brains to

process the first two circles here have nice clean borders while the last circle is fuzzy and it's more difficult to find the edges when you look at an image the main focal point is called the figure and it's processed very quickly and easily when it's well differentiated from the background or negative space of the scene known as the ground if your players can't dis uh discern figure from ground they'll have difficulty understanding how to navigate and they'll struggle with Target identification and that's the basis for the classic image you see here where ambiguity causes the brain to question whether it's looking at a Candlestick or two faces each of you will make that decision very quickly and somewhat Ambiguously because there is no right answer in a split second you'll decide whether you're looking at a Candlestick or faces but in a video game that same Split Second can be an eternity it can cost you life it can throw an important play that that that it ends the match

and the ambiguity of that decision means that your player isn't necessarily experiencing the design that you intended communicating Clarity is a fundamental part of your role as a level designer now I've heard I don't know for sure but I have heard that favella was the number one drop point in Call of dut's campaign and that their multiplayer version was actually one of their least popular Maps now obviously that feeling of overwhelming oppression and the Frantic nature of combat was the whole whole point to that mission but and and given the source material that they had to work with they actually did a pretty fantastic job of distilling it down to a gameplay experience I'm simply pointing out that there's a STK contrast that can be achieved if you focus on the use of the negative space as a tool while you're designing nor am I claiming that I myself have been immune to these problems we all struggle with it and that's exactly why I wanted to talk about it today in Gears of War we had a map called gridlock that was probably our most popular map in the franchise

and not surprisingly the map has a pretty good use of negative space with the shapes and the buildings um contrasting with the different colors and stone and the and against the background of the sky now applying those same filters as before the blur and the pallet you can see how the map's uh features still hold up the cars are still distinct from the ground that they're sitting on that gameplay space stands out from the buildings and there's a nice contrast against the background of the sky now with Gears of War 2 we wanted to bring gridlock back with an updated version that aged the environment to match the progression of the game story so we set that set out to do a theme that was overgrown and in so doing I think we actually lost a lot of that great contrast so here's uh side by side of the same exact position in Gears one and gears 2 and applying those same filters you can see that even though gears 2 has a high contrast Sky to outline the shape AP on the horizon the

overall sense of negative space is completely lost along the floor there's no figure ground distinction an important areas like hey where the gameplay takes place are just visually muddy and while admittedly there are any number of other factors going going on here here's a chart that shows map popularity in Gears of War I is a factor of time played and you'll notice that the new version of gridlock is at the very bottom of the list so with Gears of War 3 we made this awesome decision to age the map even further and this time the gameplay space became so overgrown that the game play completely fell apart what was once the most popular map in the game became that one map that our testers hated playing we hadn't changed the physical play Space the weapon load out or even the Collision but just that shift in tone and color meant to a change in perception a perception of negative space that took away the CL ity that we had gotten from that original version of

the map so we saw that this just wasn't working and near the end of the project we threw everything away and we went back to a cleaner style that brought back the contrast we were aiming for and highlighted the negative space aspects of the map not to BL the point but here's a screenshot of the map blurred and again with the other filter the cars stand out from the ground the gameplay spaces differentiated from the buildings the whole scene has a nice contrast against the background sure enough here's a chart showing this version of gridlock back in the top three most played uh maps of Gears of War 3i's lifetime application of negative space design techniques led to an increase in map readability and by extension playability and enjoyability so even though it was difficult to do at the time I'm really glad that we made that call to throw everything away and change the map and that chart tells me that the payoff was worth the effort and we might not have actually been brave enough to do that had we not already struggled with this

problem in another map and ironically that map was CTF face with the sequel to UT in Unreal Tournament 2003 we transitioned to a new version of the Unreal Engine and we decided to update facing worlds along with it and take advantage of our new Egyptian setting now the Egyptian concept for zero is the nefer it's a hieroglyph which roughly translates to the beginning of everything it's a visual representation of the heart now to the ancient Egyptians then you could say that the zero or nothing is the heart of everything now Market is no coincidence the same hieroglyph is also used to mean beautiful design is about beauty and simplicity and the importance of nothing sadly I don't think any of that actually translated into ut2 2003's version of facing worlds if you look at side by-side comparisons of the two versions of the map you can definitely see the similarities in the shape but there there are big differences in

Clarity the original facing Worlds Map had 540 actors in the entirety of the map the new version had over 4,000 the original facing worlds had 130 polygons in view from the sniping Towers this new Egyptian version had over 60,000 triang triangles in view from that same position it's a 280 times increase in detail which is quite significant even broken down into meaningful batter meaningful patterns so when whenever you're building something it's important to note how your layout will affect the player's gameplay experience you may have heard of the principle of least effort which tells us to minimize cognitive load if you overwhelm your players with too much information they're likely to struggle with processing it and I'm note that I'm talking about layout here I'm not saying that the original facing world was a better map because it had less detail you can and absolutely should add more detail to your Maps as technology goes on and I'll speak more on that in a bit but in this particular instance I'm

specifically referencing the way that those details were implemented the pyramid blocked lines of sight the trees pulled our eyes away from the gameplay space and the rolling terrain was dotted with these pools of water that got in the way of navigation both visually as well as physically decorative pieces were used to separate combat areas and it transferred um these Open Spaces into really small combat closets and because of the way our brains process visual information all of these separate elements actually combined to break up the level in undesirable ways at Epic we often talk about removing clutter from our maps and what we're really trying to say is that we need a better use of negative space ask where are your players eyes going not always but generally speaking you want their eyes focused on the game play rather than the architecture so rather than adding detail to an area to make it more beautiful ask what you can remove

is the extra geometry actually visually distracting are those new pools of water invading uh impeding navigation can you remove lights or highlight key areas with a sumato like effect maybe you can replace additional detail with just a simple shift in uh light or color as a level designer your goal should be to simplify and clarify streamline the experience and distill it down to those core important ele elements of gameplay and remember my favella example from earlier geometric color excessive polygons can be just as Troublesome as visual clutter distracting shapes and rainbow colors these two images each have a color histogram in the top right corner and in the original face you can see that color is distributed all across the histogram in high mid and low range values and note that there's a single uh color Spike on the low end and that's indicative ative of one area filled with a large with of one color which is the

dark sky box and that's important because it means there's a large area filled by a single color that's going to give you good figure ground contrast Now by comparison look at the ut2 2003 version and there's just a massive bulge along the center of the histogram with no representation in the high or low ranges and this indicates High midtone values meaning that the color is going to be fairly uniform across the board you're not going to get any great visual contrast and we need that contrast because when objects look similar our brains will process them as a single Related Group and you can simulate that contrast by actually compressing the color and the histograms and if you do that the Egyptian version becomes not surprisingly this flat white sheet while the original facing worlds becomes this really great example of figure ground reversal with all the negative faces of the gameplay areas clearly delineated

from the rest of the map and I'm being generous here by including the moon in the background that Moon actually rotates out of view naturally as the Skybox moves during gameplay and if you remove that moon from the image you get this perfect negative space outline of the level Geometry The Clarity in this view is something that you would never get in that Egyptian version where everything is just a wash of sameness that causes our brains to spend that extra time processing everything sequentially detail by detail and a simple chick as easy as squinting could have identified this problem quickly now that pyramid contributes to the problems because of its color similarity to the Rocks uh and the sand and the towers and it's all the same but it also blocks the dark balconies and doorways of the tower all of the contrast in this scene is actually hidden behind the pyramid and what's worse this scene is full of all these upward pointing shapes that drag your eyes up into the sky instead of down to

where the gamep play is taking place and this is exactly the opposite of the flla problem which had too many competing shapes and colors where fa's lack of variation still has a similar outcome for the player there's nowh for your brain to focus there's no balance to this scene now without anywhere to focus your brain either takes too much time trying to discern detail or it tries to take everything all over all at once and uh it skips over details and possibly throwing away important gameplay elements take for example this shot of an enemy sitting in the sniping perch now that first image on the left if you'll recall was the original face where I mentioned this Fato character outline compared against that same location in the new Egyptian version and you might not even see the character there at all even zoomed in and centered and focused with the sniper scope that character is barely visible if you squint he disappears there's no contrast there's no figure ground or front ground

differential there's no negative space to help Define his shape or establish a focal point for your eyes and that same problem is evident all over the map not just in the main Towers this is the flag room squint and look at it can you tell me where the flag is in this scene it's not too hard but how about the enemy who's guarding it neither stands out from their back backround both are nearly invisible and keep in mind that from a gameplay perspective these are the two most important things your player should be able to see right now can I get a show of hands for anybody who can see both there's actually a few people I'm impressed try to imagine locating these two things in the Heat of the Moment while you have this guy aiming and sniping straight at your head can anybody not see them even when they're circled yeah that's what I thought so now do the same thing in this shot

from the original map this one have intentionally blurred and you can almost instantly pick out all the important aspects of the scene you can see the flag you can see the enemy you can even see the rocket launcher sitting there on the left hand side the original face had a great use of shape contrast light color and space UT 2003's version of face had no negative space no swato and really poor G gameplay as a result and again these are really simple issues to address if you make the conscious decision to look for them look at the Egyptian version of face one last time with one minute of effort by lowering those clouds a bit slightly reducing the scale of the central pyramid you can enhance the readability of the map there's a nice shadow there now where the pyramid breaks up that Central space to add some contrast the shapes of the tower stand out a bit more because you can see some definition from the structures in the architecture the dark sky contrasts much better with the past

on the ground I could have go gone on further by actually darkening the tower entrances and removing some of those trees but this was literally less than one minute worth of effort as it shipped however poor use of negative space led to difficulties with navigation and object identification ensuring that this was never a popular map for Us online so from Egypt we move forward into Bab Bonia at a time when the zero was first introduced as a placeholder and this was utterly confusing because the the Babylonian zero was contextual it could either be 60 or 160th context as they say is everything so when Unreal Tournament 2004 included a map called facing world classic it Stripped Away all that NE unnecessary Egyptian detail but it was still only a partial success because it was built in the context of the same UT 2003 game systems this was a

more popular version of the map and there was just kind of this Collective sigh of relief from the community and quite honestly from the people internally at Epic when it was released because it looked like face again it had the same architecture it had that same setting but the game playay was always just slightly off and it never really captured that feel of the original as an example of why I want to go back again to the original facing Worlds Map and this top down view highlights the path Network that was used by the AI if you start at the center of the map and work your way toward a tower you can get there and as little as four Branch points and there's only 59 navigation points in the entirety of the map now compare that against the Egyptian version where the navigation network is suddenly highly complicated to get from the center to a tower here the minimum number of Branch points I could find is over dozen and there's 806 navigation points more than

13 times in the original now I don't want to get too abstract on theory of negative space and how that translates to Simplicity in larger game systems but you can certainly see the impact that a complicated navigation Network would have on AI and the point that I'm trying to get across is that an AI Network serves as an indicator of potential player behaviors clearly a player trying to cross the same map has has more choices to make more obstacles and more potential points for contention or confusion the open negative spaces of the gameplay area have been broken up into these smaller collections of of small areas and just as our brain can get overloaded with visual information it also gets bogged down while attempting to evaluate the differences between too many similar choices now obviously we want to give our players interesting choic es and encourage emerging gameplay but simply

adding more isn't better castal research tells us that too much Choice can actually lead to sensory overload and this is a hot button issue in autism research where the belief is currently that autistic patients are unable to filter stimuli they take in every detail of the world every little bit all around them all the time and the constant flow of information overwhelms them what is it have to do with face and level design well because our brains naturally combine details and establish patterns more information means more detail that's potentially lost when things get combined and the results from this perception study describe how much information was lost at different levels of visual threshold now so Bor to my point the the slide itself is visually overwhelming and difficult to read but the quick takeaway here is that as you increase visual information your brain will actually comprehend less

despite taking longer trying to process it this is why balance and simplicity and flow are the founding principles of design so back to facing world's classic in ut 2004 geometric shapes have been simplified contrast has been enhanced and the distracting visual elements have been Stripped Away but it inherited that same complex navigation network from the Egyptian version this means face classic also inherited the same imbalances and poor flow as seen in the Egyptian version Unreal Tournament 2004 was an update to the engine rather than a whole new engine so the Egyptian and classic versions were built in the context of the same game systems to complicate things even further here's the original facing worlds map in one toone scale relation to the classic version the new version is actually three times the size of the original version another problem

it inherited from the previous game cuz when we moved into transition into uh the new Unreal Engine 2 we had all these powerful shaders that we could do flashing lights and cracks and walls so sure why not we did it and we had the ability to add all these new geometry and now these new polygon so hey we did that too and since we needed more room to fit in all this new stuff we just made our environments bigger note that we didn't necessarily increase the size of our players only the scale of the environments and the obvious result of that decision was that individual players and important gameplay elements became more difficult to identify so how many of you can find a player in this screenshot and I get a show of hands almost everyone that's awesome how many people can see two if you can keep your hands up three 4 five six seven all

eight 9 10 11 12 13 there are 13 different players on screen in this version seeing those teeny tiny players dwarfed in this massive environment is completely overwhelming the scale of the environment means an increase in visual stimuli and that perceived increase in complexity can overwhelm the brain as much as actual choice in fact perceived complexity has been shown to be more significant than actual complexity it's that old adage of seeing of is believing and in this case it is very very true so what the brain perceives is largely based on the amount of stuff or noise that's in the periphery and more stuff means more time to process and more distraction in these images here you'll notice the long bar the red line and the Shaded box almost instantly because they

stand out you can focus on them easily because there's less complexity around them there's more negative space now the same holds true for these two rows of red dots and the two rows of blue squares and even the separated colors of mixed dots and squares but in this last image despite being the same shapes and the very same colors it has this chaotic disorganized mix that's harder to focus on and interpret quickly so even though ut2 2004's version of face had simplified shapes and good front gown contrast it still had 30,000 triangles in View From The Towers more than 200 times the amount of visual information from the original but no way to focus on any of it there's a minimum of a dozen Branch points between the center of the map and the tower entrances three times the number of navigation touch points and that doesn't count pickups of which there are twice as many compared to the original design principles tell us that in order to increase your players's capability for

decision- making and problem solving to improve gameplay in your Maps you need to minimize memory load so your players can comprehend their environment you need to reduce attention switching to keep them focused and you need to minimize the number of inferences that they need to make by making the scene quickly and easily understandable the massive amount of information and overwhelming scale of face classic LED players to perceive the environment as a complicated ated web exactly mirroring the visualization of that AI Network and important details like players tended to be lost and overlooked interestingly face classic was also the first time that we had ever Incorporated ambient audio into one of our face maps and I have no idea why but we also made this awesome decision to add a driving rock guitar soundtrack this is huge departure from the ambient void that was in all the previous versions and again I don't want to get too abstract on the meanings of

negative space but obviously you can see how heavy guitar music and crackling flames and all this ambient stuff would compare to the void of negative ambient space in all the other versions simply stripping away detail wasn't enough there was no spato here you can't create the outline of a level and then fill it in like a coloring book these design choices need to be made in the context of the game with an understanding that the systems Define the level so even though it was labeled as classic it was mired in the Pro problems of complicated game systems facing world's classic was unable to escape the effects of context now finally we have nothing zero moved from Egypt to India and it was the first time that zero actually meant nothing and that concept was so revolutionary that it spread across the world through Arabia Europe and into China and in Asia we see the first

representation of zero as a circle that now familiar zero shape so with our last and latest version of facing worlds we too went full circle back to the very roots of the map's design while also making a generational Leap Forward into Unreal Engine 3 we adopted a very distinct Asian theme and we were very careful not to lose those important aspects of gameplay and negative space that helped make the original facing Worlds Map so popular we started with the context of the original tournament gam plays map their systems and geometry and we use that as a framework upon which we would build the new map's shape scale and structure and this is where I get back to our earlier discussion of what I called clutter the original facing worlds had 130 polygons uh uh the UT 2003 version had over 60,000 which I said was a 280 time times increase in detail this new version of ut2 2003 has

over 610,000 polygons in View From The Towers that's 4700 times the original map as technology improves we absolutely can add more detail to our Maps as long as it's done in the right way you have to embrace that underlying principle of gastal that tells us that the whole is different from the sum of its parts with blur in place you can see see how the extra geometry of the ut3 map still provides a readable contrast of playable versus non-playable Space meaning less information is lost if we use the pallet filter you can see how important pieces of gameplay still stand out with the sniper purchese the central paths and the tower entrances nicely visible just as in the original version of the map histogram values show a nice distribution in the RGB curves aligned with spikes on either end just like the original version and compressing the the histogram

highlights good front ground delineation we need for the negative space areas of gameplay to be immediately readable by players just as in the original version if you highlight the path Network you can see the Simplicity in the system that highlights the clarity of routes and options only 144 nav points five branches between Tower and center of map and uh we even went so far as to recreate the original kind of soothing Drummond based music of the original face removing all those distracting guitars and highlighting the negative oral space now while I don't have any nicely defined metrics to show map popularity sadly we didn't have them at the time I can generate some anecdotal evidence to show that this map was a success it was well accepted with several servers popping up that just ran this map 24 hours a day over and over and even 6 years later it's not uncommon to see the those face only servers still in heavy rotation I can't find a single negative

thread in the game's official forums and if you're at all familiar with forums that in itself is a complete miracle in fact I actually see a bunch of messages like these praising it as the best version ever so ut3 is version had a clear front ground delineation that made gameplay spaces defined and readable high levels of detail were well organized instead of distracting and the balance of light color and shape left the map understandable Even In the Heat of compat the oral and visual aspects of ut3 facing worlds embraced all the concepts of negative space design as a designer your job is to focus on subtracting the obvious and only adding the meaningful I could never say definitively which version of face was the best but I feel very confident in saying that with the ut3 version We Were finally able to bring the essence of that original map forward in a

meaningful way and then we had the forethought to capture those aspects of negative space design that helped make the original map such a success as an industry we're often just kind of stumbling ahead and there's this arms race to continually improve graphics and raise visual Fidelity and all too often this simply means we're adding more stuff to our games open Vistas have suddenly gone uh given way to these dense forests filled with foliage clear Pathways have been replaced with these kind of techno paneled and pipe filled corridors with every bolt and every blade of grass uh rendered in startling detail but do those details actually add to the gameplay experience or can they actually be detracting from the quality and enjoyability of our games we didn't intend for the new versions of face to be less popular we didn't just randomly throw a map together but we did think specifically about negative space we

didn't account for the way that the brain takes in information we didn't distill our presentation to look at contrast or analyze the complexity of information being presented good design is about removing not adding and negative space is a very valuable tool in our design Arsenal certainly one that we tend to overlook so in the future don't forget to look at what's not there it can be so much more important than what actually is thank [Applause] [Music] [Applause] you looks like we have about 10 minutes if anybody has questions I don't know if anybody does or you just want to run off hello hey go ahead hey it's on um I 1,00% agree with everything you said um where I work our bread and butter is is multiplayer maps there's I think two additional points that could be made one

is keeping Simplicity means that the call outs are that much more important M if you have detail everywhere then you just don't know what to call out in the heat of battle where are you I'm in the blue room I'm in the Red Room I'm in whatever absolutely uh and the other one is effects that's one of my pet peeves sometimes is when you have effects of papers blowing on the ground or sand going across the ground and that Split Second you know is it an enemy is it a threat or is it just pretty that was that was a huge version that Original Egyptian version of face like there was these pools of water on the ground that you would stumble in and then it would Splash and you couldn't get out and you're trying to swim and and you know dust blowing and obscuring the grass yeah it just absolutely could be a big mess I totally agree and I am an artist by the way so I still agree 100% about it awesome thank you hi hi uh I also spent a lot of time as an artist um and uh my question is do have you spent any time figuring out how to

create a rule set for this that could be applied to procedural generation of levels that is an area that we're just starting to get into at Epic um we are kind of transitioning away from traditional level design in terms of building blocks and and pieces and leading more into procedural stuff sadly I can't really talk about that yet um but I can say that uh in the past we this isn't it's not like we walked around the office saying you need better negative design in your Maps but we do actually use those terms we do talk about the way that shapes are organized we do talk about contrast and balance and all those things um and you know like I said we did have that squint tool that we used so we do use those terms just in our day-to-day work um and how we've carried those forward and into new design techniques maybe I'll be able to talk about next year uh yeah you uh you touched on the fact

that in uh I think was Black Ops I forgot what you called D the game it was you said FLL and the single player was one of the most popular maps and multiplayer it was the least popular or one of the least popular uh do you have some insight on maybe why that might be like what kind of I mean that was the whole point like I I can't say definitively I don't have their analytics but I would guess that it was so overwhelming that it was much more difficult to play that there was enemies coming from everywhere you couldn't pick them out you didn't know which paths you should take there was multiple options it was just like every single bit of it was visually orally mentally stimulating over stimulating and I think a lot of people just gave up and out of sheer confusion that that would be my guess and based on the guys that I've talked to from that team um they kind of indicated that that was the case awesome all right thank you guys for

your time and attention appreciate it