GDC 2013 Moonsoo Park

Post date: Apr 01, 2013 1:39:44 PM

 AAA Level Design in Day Bootcamp

  I took AAA Level Design in Day Bootcamp. There were many interesting talks about Level Design.

My favorite one is a talk from Skyrim Level Designers. First of all, It was really shocking when I heard this.

Only Nine people could create entire Skyrim world. Two of them are Environment Artist, and Others(Seven people) were Level Designer. I actually didn't even know there is people only working on Level Design. I thought Level Design is also part of Environment artist's works.  

 The talk was basically about how to design organic shape environment because most of environment in skyrim is Rock and Mountain. The one thing that kept emphasizing was "Try to avoid symmetrical shape". They showed example of symmetrical shape mesh environment and emphasize how wired looking environment it is. However it also can be looked awkward with Unsymmetrical shape meshes if it is repeated too much. To avoid that problem it is easy and fast to just simply flip the mesh, but Unsymmetrical shape mesh cannot be flipped. So in Skyrim there is always a mesh connecting Original mesh and flipped mesh. 

They also emphasized to avoid square shape environment. Especially, it could look very wired for organic shape environment. They said Square shape mesh is very good as a modular kit, but at the same time, it also make your environment very boring and awkward. As a solution, they suggested to simply add one more wall mesh at the corner  to break the right angle.