Today we’re going to tell you about level design (aka level design) and the basics of creating a seamless world.
Levels in the game are the steps the player climbs to reach a goal. As he gains new levels, new opportunities open up in front of him:
- Weapons.
- Skills.
- Quests.
Levels are needed for even character and plot development. And for plausibility, modern games strive for seamlessness.
What is a seamless world?
Seamless world – a playing field that you don’t have to wait for a reload to move between locations. For developers, realizing a seamless world is more difficult, but for the player, such games are more appealing. Seamlessness allows for uninterrupted immersion in gameplay, from which there are no distractions from loading between locations in seamless worlds.
For example, in a seamless world, moving from a street to a building requires no waiting – the player continues to play as if they had entered the room in real life. This eliminates the feeling of falseness and adds to the gaming excitement.
Techniques for creating a seamless world
For game designers, creating a seamless world is a task that has to be approached from several angles at once. The techniques used to create a complete seamless world include:
- Navigation.
Open world – terrain with no entrance or exit. Usually a city, island, or settlement, when trying to get out of which the character runs into a wall, traffic jam, or something similar that prevents them from crossing the boundary of the world. In the end, the player gets bored with it, and when trying to pass the map completely, he now and then finds new interesting microlocations or quests, so the desire to find the end of the world goes to the background.
The game designer’s job when creating a seamless world is to design the location so that it brings the player back to the game, rather than accompanying their search for the end of the map. Therefore, cities can be looped – all streets will lead to each other, and the main game will take place somewhere in the center of the map.
At the same time, the seamless world opens up new opportunities for exploring the terrain. For example, ventilation passages and mines in many open-world games are in constant reach. Exploring them is fun and gives people a way to safely move between areas of the game map, which is especially important if the game is frequently fought.
Despite the fact that in real life ventilation is not everywhere, and a person of average build could hardly move freely through it, such an option in the game does not seem strange, but on the contrary, adds the effect of immersion. This applies to other ways of moving around in the open seamless world as well.
The use of realistic locations also benefits the immersion. A theater, a mall, a concert hall – places that a person has been to many times in his or her life. By preserving the logic of the location structure, you save the player from wasting time studying the map: once in a familiar area, it’s easier to act intuitively.
- Safety Mechanics.
When trying to make a game believable, it’s important for developers to keep in mind maintaining a sense of security in the player. Therefore, games should still have places for the character to hide behind, even if in real life the chosen hiding place would not provide safety.
Okay. For example, in shootout games, the character hides behind furniture, stair railings, guardrails, and other questionable objects. But unlike in real life, in the game, such shelters provide a sense of security. At the same time, regardless of the size of the cover, the character always manages to hide behind it.
This includes creating missions that are impossible to fail, unless you try specifically. A game that gives the player the means to achieve goals is always a winner because it does not evoke negative emotions.
- Interior Manipulation.
Game interiors are an order of magnitude larger than real life apartment interiors. This is due to the controls and camera – moving between first-person and third-person perspectives, the camera requires space. That’s why the in-game apartments are almost twice the size of the real ones – to give the player enough room to pass through.
With realistic builds, developers have to make trade-offs. For example, in old narrow buildings, there is usually only one apartment, which can only be accessed through a window or ventilation – there is no room for stairs.
When creating a seamless world, it’s easier with large buildings – there’s enough space to place several interior locations that the player can move between. By adding ultra-modern design the game creator also benefits by distracting the player from the scale of the building and emphasizing its interior. This technique was often used by game creators 10-15 years ago, when the level of graphics was not so high to realistically convey, for example, an ancient city, but enough to draw space stations without fine details.
- Modules
The visual integrity of the seamless world is achieved through the use of modular parts. For example, the use of similar elements of the facades of old buildings helps to increase the holistic perception of the location. Modular structures are also typical of the real world, so during the game the brain does not have to be distracted by looking at the details – they are all the same.
The modularity of the seamless world is convenient for developers as well. Working out the design of levels, they have the opportunity to use such a constructor of modules, in which only some details need to be changed. This allows you to focus on the design of transitions between locations and their internal equipment and not waste time on pretentious unlikeable buildings.
- Continuity principle
The modules used to create a seamless world also affect the permanence of the game location. It is important to keep the actions that a player can do with the same items in different locations uniform.
For example, if a character can interact with a stove, cabinet, or refrigerator in one building, you should leave that option open for them in another building as well. Failure to maintain consistency can cause dissonance and detract from gameplay. Plus, interacting with items can be part of the gameplay, and by pushing things away, the character can find nice power-ups that they’ll need in the game.
Following the same game rules for objects deepens a person’s immersion in the game. These rules define the seamless world and make it similar to reality, as they remain the same for all similarly-similar objects – just like in real life. Drawing an analogy with reality, imagine that in one apartment you are burned by a stove on, and in another you touch it calmly. That would raise a lot of questions.
These basic principles allow for the creation of seamless, realistic game worlds where the player feels part of the gameplay. Despite the limited scope of the game map, the story, gameplay, and world, which are designed in stages, allow you to keep the player’s attention on the prescribed tasks while maintaining his interest in the game.
3 games with a quality seamless world
We have collected 3 examples of games with seamless world that successfully utilize the techniques described above:
- Assassin’s Creed Unity. An example of an open world with blind rooms. The character, getting into the apartment from the street, can calmly walk around in it, perform game tasks. But you can’t get out of it the usual way – through the doors – because this possibility would force the developers to expand the location, which would not fit with the scale of a small building of a typical European town.
- Deus Ex: Mankind divided. The game is exemplary thanks to its detailed seamless world. The looped streets of ancient Prague keep the player from reaching the limits of the game map, the use of familiar and typical buildings encourages intuitive achievement of goals, and the observed principle of consistency in interaction with objects deepens immersion in the game. The developers also successfully get away with interior design, leaving large apartments that can’t be entered through normal doors, or hiding the entrances to large locations behind lush trees, covering up the facade of the building and detracting from its apparent size.
- The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. The player is left with a sense of control over the world due to the constant ability for a number of items to interact. The player can create blocks of ice, ride a shield, and move metal objects at will. At the same time, one does not reach the conventional end of the map, as new tasks and challenges arise along the way.
By following the principles of creating a seamless world, it is possible to develop a game whose world will resemble the real world and players will be fully immersed in the gameplay.
Earlier we also wrote about how the main character’s motivation affects immersion.
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