The game development journey continues

After a short break over Christmas, I return to game development in full swing. As another study block begins, I am eager to continue to develop my creative and technical skills in new and exciting ways. This module looks to give the most creative free reign of any yet and I am eager to begin development, documenting my progress here on the blog.

Response to the brief

Due to the brief’s open-ended nature, I initially was met with a degree of choice paralysis regarding what I would base my project around. I took some time to understand what area of design I wanted to spend this study block developing.

Narrative design and mechanics design are what I feel most confident in. However, as Terry said, this module is a good excuse to strengthen areas of game design that I may be weaker in. While initially I was tempted to further develop these skills, I eventually decided that I would like to spend this time increasing my proficiency in an area I am much less confident with – level design. A key goal of mine is to have a wide design skillset, so as to be a useful team member in a variety of contexts, and I feel this project will help me take another step in that direction.

Once settling on level design, I quickly decided that  I would like to use the Creation Kit to make a dungeon within the world of Skyrim (2011). I was eager to do this because:

• I am very familiar with Skyrim. I feel that this knowledge will help me to make a level that is effective, while also subverting particular expectations about the game’s dungeon design.
• By choosing to mod a game, I can focus purely on level design. If I were to create a level space in an engine like Unity, much of my time would be spent scripting a character controller and mechanics, which would take away from crucial time that could be spent elsewhere.
• Skyrim’s dungeon’s are modular. Bethesda use “kits” to build their interior level spaces. These are essentially packages of modular assets that fit together to make dungeons. Due to their modularity, levels can be efficiently blocked out, and I can focus on how the level flows and feels, rather than if it is consistent and functional.

Getting familiar with Creation Kit

After spending some time making sure that the Creation Kit was correctly installed and set-up, I was ready to get into the engine and begin learning its intricacies. After following along with a number of tutorials online, I already feel that I am getting to grips with the engine. This is likely due to my experience in Unity, which has a lot of similarities and analogues to what is found here.

Interestingly, the Creation Kit works primarily using three windows: the ‘Object Window’, the ‘Cell Window’, and the render window’. The Object Window is where you can find almost any asset, effect, or marker used in Skyrim that can be dragged into your level. The Cell Window features a list of all objects currently in your level. Finally, the Render Window, is unsurprisingly, where you edit and interact with your level. There is also a handy toolbar that is used to handle features such as grid snapping, Navmeshing, physics, and much more.

For an engine that is over ten years old, I am impressed with the Creation Kit’s functionality. However one feature of many engines is sorely missing: the ability to play and test your scene in-engine. The only way to actually test my implementation is to start up the game and load into the dungeon using a console command. While this certainly works, it is far more time-consuming than I am used to, and makes me appreciate how far game engines have come.

Now that I have spent a decent amount of time experimenting with the engine, learning keyboard shortcuts, and familiarising myself with Bethesda’s naming conventions, I feel confident to begin production of my level next week.

Research

A lot of my research this week has been spent familiarising myself with the Creation Kit. Thankfully, Bethesda made a ten-part tutorial series (Bethesda, 2012) that I was able to follow along with. It goes over the basics of navigating the engine, working with kits, setting up Navmeshes, and general behavioural scripting for NPCs and enemies. While it is hard to cover the breadth of the Creation Kit in one tutorial series, I feel that it has sufficiently taught me enough to begin creating levels with the tool.

I wanted to understand the process behind Bethesda’s level creation, so that I could best replicate it myself to make a high quality level. To do this, I started by watching a fascinating GDC talk (Burgess, 2014) by Bethesda’s lead level designer Joel Burgess on the iterative level design process of Skyrim and Fallout 3 (2008). It was a very insightful talk, discussing the importance of iteration, and effectively organising your time as a developer to maximise productivity and minimise setbacks. Bethesda break their level design up into roughly five ‘passes’ (Concept > Layout > Gameplay > Complete > Polish) and never advance onto a new pass until the previous is fully implemented across all levels. I intend to replicate this process: concepting my entire level, blocking out the spaces, making sure the combat and item placement is balanced, finalising pacing/flow, and finally polishing everything to a high standard.

I then watched another GDC talk (Burgess and Purkeypile, 2015) on the modular art of Fallout 4 (2015). The talk covered the benefits and drawbacks of working with modular “kits”, and how they can be best utilised to make for the most efficient workflow. They also discussed how their assets had been improved and expanded on in response to issues and inconsistencies in Skyrim’s modular assets. By learning what had been improved on, I was able to better understand the limitations of Skyrim’s assets and development engine.

Finally, I have started playing through Skyrim again, for the countless time. This time, however, I am paying close attention to the layout of its many dungeons, and making as many notes as possible. In particular, I am intending to analyse how each kit’s pieces are utilised, and how the level designers used elements of clutter and various inserts to hide repetition that can set in with modular art assets.

References

BETHESDA. 2012. Creation Kit Tutorial Series [YouTube tutorial series]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDKivlGmia4 [accessed 24 January 2022].

BURGESS, Joel. 2014. How We Used Iterative Level Design to Ship Skyrim and Fallout 3 [GDC talk]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhW8CY8XkFg&t=1655s [accessed 25 January].

BURGESS, Joel and Nate PURKEYPILE. 2016. Fallout 4’s Modular Level Design [GDC talk]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBAM27YbKZg [accessed 28 January].

Fallout 3. 2008. Bethesda Game Studios, Bethesda Softworks.

Fallout 4. 2015. Bethesda Game Studios, Bethesda Softworks.

Skyrim. 2011. Bethesda Game Studios, Bethesda Softworks.