Level Design

 

• Creation of core principles for each biome
• Creation of design principles for new maps
• Creation of workflow to implement new maps into the existing world
• Partaking in discussions about visual progression

Picking my Role
During this update phase I was helping out on several different features, so as Feature Owner on the Biome Rework I had to pick my battles. I decided to help set up design rules with the Level Design team so that they could work independently, and aided the Art and Environment Department in decision making and in bigger discussions. 

Level Design Principles
Albion areas are a template system. There is a master template which dictates the overarching environment. This master template has empty slots where we can place gameplay templates or environmental templates, like a giant jigsaw puzzle.

Our old maps were very detailed, quite pretty, but cluttered.
Instead of having each part of the map fighting over attention we decided to make the world more believable, more real by letting elements breathe. 

Each of the 50 master templates got a theme dictated by the biome design rules. For example, we wanted mountain areas to feel like you are on a mountain side, which means each map has a slope, with some sides or corners being the low end and the other sides or corners being the top. Having that in mind it was easy to create mountain peaks, slopes, or valleys as themes.

Each section of a new map was seen as a "room" and designed like one. A room needs to give a player authority of decision but also be readable enough for a player to make decisions. A lot of detail is great, but if you can't see the exit on the highway something is a miss. Maps were designed with compositional rules such as big, medium, small and landmarks in mind. Repetition was kept to a minimum. Each room should only have a few bigs, more mediums and quite a bit of smalls. But that created a nice rhythm of space and negative space.

As soon as these rules were set in stone, the Level Design team set out to design amazing maps and templates. The Final approval was given by the Game Director and Myself.

The Level Design team and the Art team did amazing work on this feature and I could not be more proud.

World Design

• Created a system to reuse 50 maps on 500 areas without having it look repetitive
• ​Created a workflow for implementing new maps into the existing world
• Implementing and the new maps, filling them with gameplay and reconnecting all pieces

Recreating the World
While production was running, I had to figure out how to replace 500+ areas with 50 new maps and make it look non-repetitive. 

Thanks to the work I had previously done on the Outland Rework I could adjust my excel sheets of the world to help me place maps.

The excel sheet allowed me to see which map I used how often, in which location and in which rotation. This made it possible for me to create an easy to understand table which showed me what needed replacing, what needed inserting and what needed reconnecting.

Assembling the new areas
The Level Design Team and I developed a new design approach for unused slots with our master templates. Formerly these slots would have been filled by landmarks, such as massive hill or a dense forest, where every meter was detailed out. The new approach used these empty slots to compliment the master template, work with it. These new templates used the same form language and design principles as the master templates so they could melt seemlessly into the environment.

It was my task to make them melt seemlessly into the environment, while giving each master template its own identity with the templates I used. The same master template could look very different whether I picked hill templates to fill in the holes or lakes.