The ability to switch out these assets is part of how you can make a player feel that the world is bigger and more open than it really is without messing with performance. Those things have to be designed into the game to allow it to happen." To manage that kind of swap you have to create a place where the landscape dips down a little and I can put a giant rock down in front so I know if you're in a specific spot there's five seconds you can't see what's in front of you and I can do the swap. "You currently have an unobstructed sightline the whole way through. "Sometimes it's like I really need to swap something to go from the cheap version to the full version because you're about the physically walk up to that space so you have to be clever," says Ng. It's not always caves that can perform this function, it can be any space where you can transition from the lower resolution version to the one you need for close-ups. We have a little cave you can go through so during the cave area there's a lot of swapping going on." A lot of what is hard about my job is that it's hopefully invisible to the player. So there's a proxy art we populate around. "You make the full resolution version for when you're walking there but once it's done I make a way cheaper version that just has the main shapes and that's the stuff we swap in when you're not physically anywhere near that space. "At your tower you're at a very high point so we want to give you a sense you can see everywhere, but you can't draw all of that obviously." Instead there are different sets of assets for near and far view. At your tower, for example, the landscape spreads out ahead of you, rolling off into the distance. Little tricks like that help a lot in making you feel like you're outdoors."īut at various points you can see for what seems like miles. Every time you do a little turn you feel like you're seeing something new. Things I would do would be like trying to draw out a more S-curve to the path and change terrain up so it breaks your sight line so you're not just seeing where you're going. "The easiest way would be flat ground but that's not interesting. "Let's say I have to make this room like an outdoor space and we're supposed to make the player go to the other end," says Ng. When you walk into the space you can see pretty much everything there is to see. There are a dozen or so tables housing a number of journalists and their laptops. It's a cavernous room with a basically square floor plan. Explaining how this works, Ng indicates the press room where we're sitting. "We try to make it very clear from the beginning that you can't go up certain things so as long as you're really consistent with it people learn the language."Īnother important aspect of Firewatch is a sense of discovery. In a game like Firewatch you thus need to introduce a consistent gameplay vocabulary so players know what they can and can't do in this world and internalise those rules. I've inched my way up mountains in Elder Scrolls games rather than go around the base, bull-headedly shoving the character along terrain in defiance of a smoother but longer experience. In real life sometimes if an area was particularly steep that would be enough to deter most people, but in a game you get into the habit of brute forcing your way across areas. "How, as a human being, do I know I'm not supposed to go down this?" was one of the questions which would come up. Ng likes to hike and so could put bits of real life experience to work in the game, although some of it needed adapting. It still functions as a wall because you can't actually walk into the vista but it's not going to create the same sense of being hemmed in as a big wall of sheet rock towering above you. "I spent a lot of time thinking about how to fence in the player while not always fencing you in in the sense of surrounding you by a wall – that feels very claustrophobic and wouldn't feel like a forest." One method she mentions is a vista. "Firewatch is challenging because we have to give this sense that the world is a lot more open," says Ng. Senior environment artist, Jane Ng, told me more about how the world actually works and how she hides the technical side from players: Firewatch is not an open world game, but is has these beautiful, expansive vistas, gorgeous trees and a very definite sense of being outdoors. By that I mean I wanted to find out how different studios create a sense of space or place that's natural or expansive. While preparing for this year's Game Developers Conference I decided I wanted to learn more about how "outside" works in videogames.
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