Building an open world

Bu
g
game without an Army

GDC 2010

Nate Fox
Sucker Punch
P
Presentation Objective

The goal of this presentati

Th
is to share some technique
for creating a large open-
open
w
world urban environment
with a handful of artists.
nfamous’ environment was created by a team of 12 artists

Here’s how they did it.

 Top Level Outline
• Exp
xpectations in open world gam
• Benefits of asset reuse
• Hex Tile System
• Sta
tandardized Building Footprint
• City Layout tricks
• Organic Spaces
• Streaming Issues
• The Cons
• Conclusion
 Expectations in open world games
First, let’s break down what Pla
Players expect from Open World
environments before explaining Sucker Punch’s system for
meeting those expectations...

• Giant game world

• Interactivity
• Areas for Discovery
• Diverse Visuals
 Expectations - Giant Game World

Players expect your world to fefeel huge… adventure all the way
to the horizon!
Finding a way to make good on this expectation is an incredibly
expensive proposition.
A huge, yet bland world, is a failure.
Failing to deliver on scale will give the impression that your
game is anemic.
 Expectations - Interactivity
• Obviously, since it’s a videogame, players expect an
interactive landscape of opportunity.
• Finding ways to make the world more than a static
sculpture to walk through is also a complex design task
and expensive art proposition. Plan ahead!
Expectations – Areas for Discovery

• While
hile much of the game world is
open at the start of the game,
playeyers expect to discover uniqu
areas as they poke around.
• Failil to
t provide areas for discover
and your game isn’t “deep”.
Expectations – Diverse Visuals

• While
hile real cities are generally fai
homo
mogenous, open world games
featu
ature a great variety of differen
types of places to visit.
• A variety
var of neighborhoods is the
tradit
ditional solution to this problem
• Failil to
t offer diverse visuals and
your game will feel repetitive.
 Benefits of Asset Reuse
Why be a cheapskate and look for ways to reuse assets as
much as possible? Let’s break it down.

Cities are naturally

repetitious
Reuse allows you to focus
on what’s important
Gameplay steals the
gamer’s attention
Benefits of Reuse – Cities
ies are naturally repetitious

• How
ow many different objects are
can be found on a street?
• Ser
eriously, once you have a cou
stre
treetlights, dumpsters, bus sto
etc, you’ve got a city full of
believable stuff.
• Bui
uildings are the same way. Ho
maany skyscrapers do you need
bef
efore you can’t tell them apart
Benefits of Reuse – Reus
use allows you to focus on
what’s important.

If you made a pie chart forr h

how to spend time working
on the game environment, how would it look?
Would you rather work on n rrank and file buildings or Evil
Villain lairs?
Both artists and players want the Evil Layers.
They’re the areas of
interest that players
will remember.
 Not every city block can be an Evil Lair…
remember, you need to deliver a huge world!
Benefits of Reuse – Gameplay steals the
Player’s attention
For most of the game th
the player is going to be
focused on the interactive elements…
…A.K.A. the enemies shooting at him!
ocus your expressive artt o
on where players are goin
o be spending their time…
e… everywhere else, reuse
 Hex Tile System
This is the system we used during
ing the production of inFAMOUS t
solve the aforementioned open-world
world creation issues.

The Basics
Intersection Simplification
Edge Conditions
Roads
Elevation
Shoreline Hexes
Hex Tile System – The Basics

• All of inFamous is
created around tile
hex pieces
• This is the map fo
the first island of t
game
Hex Tile System – Intersection Simplification
• Each of the hexes is bui
around an intersection.
• Intersections are harder
model than straight
roads… so we made the
easy to reuse.
• Intersections are often
identical in real life cities
(same angles, stop light
etc.). So consistency
equals believability.
Hex Tile System – Edge Conditions

• Each hex has a small

number of mirrored edge
types so that each of the
tiles can cleanly abut
another tile.
• Given that the edges are
identical, this hides the h
seam as everything lines
up perfectly.
 Hex Tile System –
Edge Conditions
• The system is the same
employed by many
boardgames.
• Carcassonne tiles are the
best example of the idea.
• By limiting the amount of
edges types on your tiles y
make it easy to fit them
together in a variety of way
 Hex Tile System – Edge Conditions

• Carcassonne demonstratrates that organic designs can

emerge from a limited palette of tile edge options.
Hex Tile System – Roads
• Here are four versio
of the same hex tile
moved and rotated.
• The buildings are
represented by
colored boxes
• Even with just a sing
hex tile complex
roadways can be
created.
 Hex Tile System – Roads

Of course the roads all line

e up perpendicular to the hex
edge… this makes the seam am nearly impossible to detec
Hex Tile System – Elevation

• Adding elevation is a
easy as creating a n
“hill” edge condition.
• So long as it lines up
with other hills there
no problem.
Hex Tile System – Shoreline Hexes

• At some point your cit

will need a boundary,
place where it stops.
• We went with water.
• Shorelines are just
another edge conditio
they line up next to ea
other just like everyth
else.
Hex Tile
System

• Here’s that map again… maybaybe now you can see how all the
edges of the hex pieces line up for easy reuse?
 Building Footprints
The buildings in our game all fit into predetermined slots (or
“footprints”) on each Hex Tile.

• Functional Stand-ins
• Footprint Swap-Outs
• Building Variety
• HSV Shifting
 Building
Footprints

Here’s a good shot of just how a building footprint works in

njunction with the hex edge. See ee how street defines the sidewal
d then the building is built right up to the edge of the sidewalk?
The alley space behind the buildin
lding is where the Hexes join up.
at way, the buildings don’t need touch each other.
Building Footprints – Functional Stand-ins

• All of the different

colored buildings t
the left are identica
• By creating one
version of a buildin
you can insert it in
all spaces that
accept that footprin
Building Footprints – Footprint Swapouts

• This means you can

“art out” your game
relatively quickly… the
replace the duplicated
structures as desired
time permits.
• You’d be surprised
how hard it is to spot
the repetition of the
base structure.
 Building Footprints – Building Variety

• Creating two completely differe

erent buildings for the same hex
footprint is an option…
• …Yet what people really tend to notice are the details-
details stuff lik
signs and storefronts, not the bricks.
 Building Footprints – Building Variety

The street level of our buildings had pre-set

pre holes carved out for storefront
hat way artists could mix & match different stores with buildings.
 Building Footprints – Building Variety

By creating standardized store “footprin

prints” early on, you can easily fill up the
ame world and then replace what you’d like if you’ve got the time.
 Building Footprints – HSV Shifting

• Some objects (both on street level and on buildings) can be

given a lot of variety through HSV
SV shifting the object’s textures.
 City Layout
Here are some cheap tricks we used to make our
city feel that much bigger...

Sight Lines
Y Intersections
Weenies
Identity of Spaces
Gated Content
 City Layout – Sight Lines

• We e always
a try to avoid looking down
long lanes of empty space.
• Run
unning down these streets gives y
the fee
feeling that you’re not moving very
fast because you don’t reach your
visual objective very quickly.
• Emp
mploying long straight streets also
cuts ddown the number of conceptual
streets
ets in the city (after all, you only
havee sso many square kilometers to
work with).
City Layout – Y Intersections

• Streets and alleys that end in Y

Interse
rsections are ideal because they
block long sight lines.
• They also function well for nice
revealals as the player rounds the corne
• Y Intersections
Int are also very camera
friendl
dly; since they’re obtuse angles it
easier
ier for the camera to get around
them without getting snagged.
City Layout – Weeniess ((Distinctive Architecture)
• Of course,
cou at some point your Player
will wan
ant to catch their bearings. Adding
tall “wee
eenies” in high profile spots will
provide identity to a neighborhood.
• If you
ou’ve reused a lot of architecture
earlierr o
on that means you can spend
more time working on this sort of
building
ing… the kind of structure people
care about.
• Ween enies are ideal places to create
mission specific, “one off” geometry.
City Layout – Identity of Spaces

• Ideal
eally each street should have a hig
profile element to give it identity.
• Thisis is primarily to help make the city
feel les
less repetitive… and to also help
with player navigation.
• We e used
u a combination of signage, E
train tra
tracks, riot damage, blast damage
weenie
nies, Jumbotrons, shoreline acces
and park space to do this.
 City Layout –
Gated Content

• Of course, players will want more content as the game

progresses. In open world gamemes you need to give Players a lo
of square kilometers early on… aand then unlock even more later
to keep them interested.
 City Layout –
Gated Content
• Happily, since unlockable conte
is initially unavailable, a Player’s
im
imagination will fill it in as “BIG”.
Th
They’ve yet to run around in it and
get bored.
 Organic Spaces

ganic spaces don’t need to be built

ock step with sidewalks. They
come one-off areas that extend
er many building footprints.

• Parks
• Destroyed Areas
• Sea Space
 Organic Spaces - Parks

We created a one-off
mound of grass to cover
this large area of the city.
 Organic Spaces - Parks

Since parks mainly consist of

repeated plants this isn’t a
disaster from a modeling
standpoint.
They’re also easy places to
add elevation variety.
 Organic Spaces – Destroyed Areas

• Destroyed areas are identical to parks in their

construction process… jus
just replace grass with rubble.
 Organic Spaces – Sea Space

At the edge of a shoreline hex artists placed assets

wherever they’d like since nothing has to line up.
This leads to some cool orga
rganic rock and junk formation
Organic Spaces – Sea Space

• Als
lso, waterfront warehouses ar
fantastic line-of-sight
line blockers.
• Pla
layers aren’t able to tell just
how small an island really is
when looking down a street
tow
owards the water, because all
they see is another building.
Steaming Issues

• We used the standard he

tile as the basic unit for o
streaming engine.
• At some point you need t
decide what you’re going
load in and out. Ultimate
our city construction
process heavily influence
how we did it.
Collectibles help leverage the art
• Pla
lacing collectables around the wo
help
elps drive players into places they
might not normally go.
• Enhances sense of exploration.
 The Cons
Our system is good for making co
content relatively fast, but there ar
some real negatives…
• Hex building footprints can make for odd shaped
buildings.
• Hex system (and Y intersecsections) can make it easy for
the player to get lost.
• Lack of standard four way 90 degree traffic
intersections is unrealistic.
• Space between buildingss a and alley widths are always
equivalent.
 The Cons
Alleys are problematic

Uniform alley edges are the

he same everywhere you go,
and it’s hard to easily make them unique as they
straddle two hexes.
Alley textures need to always be the same (so that
edges line up) and it creates repetition.
The space between hexess is hard to determine who has
ownership.
 Conclusion

Reuse is fantastic because it lets you focus on that stuff that

matters to both you and to gamers.
Creating geometry footprint guid
uidelines (for roads, buildings and
storefronts) allows you to experie
erience a large world early on. Th
is incredibly useful for mission cr
creators as they won’t be tied to
the Artist’s schedule.
Questions?