23/3/2018 0 Comments ResearchNow I had an idea of what the city would look like, I scoured the web, looking for some inspiration. I looked at old city plans, and some flavour shots of buildings and architecture. I knew that in more ancient times it was customary to place impressive (especially ones that carried religious significance) at the highest point in the city. This would make the building appear closer to the heavens, it would also dominate the skyline and look down upon the less important constructions below it. It also instilled a sense of awe in any visitors, as the first thing they noticed when entering the gates was the temple/castle/palace looming over them. Notable examples are found with the Acropolis in Athens, Edinburgh Castle (although with castles the high placement also has strategic value) and Wat Phra That Doi Suthep in Chiang Mai, a sight that used to great me each time I strode out to my balcony when I lived in Thailand. I also looked at the older maps and city plans, and attempted to get a feel of how the cities were laid out, along with a selection of famous landmarks. Landmarks and unique features are useful when creating a space for players to navigate. They can be beacons, interesting features for players to discover, they can lend a sense of place or flavour to a certain area but most importantly they help orient players and provide memory triggers for navigation. It is usually the unique landmarks we recall when finding our way around a new environment, they are also the signposts which we use when giving directions to others; “Just head down the road until you come to the old oak tree, then take a left, you’ll see an old church with two spires then your location is just on the right.” Thankfully there were a few of these landmark structures detailed in the passage, so now I had to link them together. In order to put the whole city together it was time to refer back to an urban planning theory, that of “Figure Ground Theory”. This is a method of exploring the shapes created by buildings and the negative space which surrounds them. An ideal urban plan should include a series of open or positive spaces for people to congregate, such as piazzas, parks and town squares. Linking these would be a network of negative spaces, shaped by the buildings around them. The negative corridors would shepherd people from positive to positive space, and provide easily recalled routes of transit. With all this in mind it was time to start some scribbling, so I set about putting together a series of concept sketches. When I had a fairly good idea of how the city would look overall it was time to layout the streets and start detailing individual structures.
0 Comments
19/3/2018 0 Comments Open World CitiesI love Skyrim, in fact I love all the Elder Scrolls games I've played since Morrowind. Something struck me as I was playing through the latest version I've acquired, the Skyrim Special Edition on PS4, and that was that the population of Skyrim must be about 80... The "cities" in the game have around 6-8 houses in (one of which is put aside for you to buy) and if each has 1-3 people living in them, then that doesn't add up to much. The Imperial City in Oblivion felt far more grand, but the general copy/paste nature of the architecture and the "same-ness" of the layout detracted from that somewhat. The outlying cities in Cyrodil however, had a more unique feel but in scope fell into the same trap as Skyrim. The inverse of this problem was a game I remember playing on the PS2, True Crime: Streets of L.A. The map was huge, the trailer boasted "400 square miles of true L.A. streets" but by jove it was boring. Getting from mission checkpoint to mission checkpoint felt like a morning commute. Most people play video games to escape the drudgery of their daily lives, not to role-play the part of California highway traffic jam simulator. I think this is why Rockstar's approach to their open world design is the winning formula: Don't accurately recreate a city, but design a pastiche, a caricature. Take all the interesting bits, all the landmarks the aspects that define the city and eliminate the dull stuff in between. Driving around Los Santos feels like a "best of" hits tape of L.A. You have Venice Beach and Hollywood Boulevard, South Central and Beverly Hills, but the areas that link them have been truncated to keep things constantly interesting. Another game which has a good city is The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Novigrad is the main city in the base game, and has a balance of size to scope which feels just about right. When you first arrive it all feels a bit overwhelming, with numerous houses, stalls, warehouses and taverns. Nestled between are a selection of shops, guard towers, cattle pens and temples. The game also orients you by sending you to the main town square to complete a few objectives, and from here you also get to know the Kingfisher Inn, which houses a lot of the early quests. By becoming familiar with the location of the Kingfisher you also quickly get to know that the main square is a hub for the city and each subsequent district can be accessed via this plaza. It’s a clever merging of urban design and quest design which gradually eases the player into the space and unobtrusively orients them.
With all this in mind I thought it would make for an interesting project to design and layout a 3D city, and if I used Unreal Engine 4 would be relatively easy to make a playable prototype, which players could navigate around. For inspiration and content I approached my brother, who for years has been crafting a fantasy world to use in his attempts to become a fantasy author. I thought it would be a good test of design skills to take a space he had already dreamt up and convert it from the written passage to a fully realised 3D space. This way I could work through the process of adapting existing works into a game environment. I started by asking him for a suitable place and he sent me a passage he had written detailing a dwarvern party encountering the human city of Overkember. My challenge was to adapt the city into something manageable. For anyone interested, the original text passage is available at the link on the main game page. |
AuthorIan is an avid player of video games, a watcher of movies, a reader of comics and books and occasionally a dad. Archives
May 2018
Categories |