by Paul C. Schuytema and the Prey Team
Playin' in the BandFrankly, most of our development team toils on the fringe. We're like the luthiers and brass workers for an orchestra--we make the instruments used in a concert, but we do not play them. We may build the lights and plug them in, but we don't select the colored gels or position the lights. We may write the script of the play, pen the dialogue, but we are not the actors... In short, a large chunk of the vital work most of the development team does is aimed at providing our GSEs (GameSpace Engineers) with the tools, content, and technical foundations necessary to actually build Prey. Programmers create the engine, artists create the bitmaps and models, Lee [Jackson] crafts the sound effects, KMFDM writes and performs the music, and I write the story; but those are just building blocks. Using Preditor, our GSEs actually make the game--it's an awesome responsibility we shove onto their shoulders.
The Burdened Soul of a GSECreating environments for a game is quite an eclectic responsibility. It's very easy to define the skill sets needed in a programmer, 2D artist, or modeler, but the skill sets needed for our GSEs are far less defined. Our GSEs come from three very different backgrounds: Matt Wood delivered pizzas in Pottsville, Pennsylvania; John Anderson worked at Lockheed-Martin; and Martinus was a professional musician, producer, and club DJ in Munich. Yet they all shared the same passion: they played games obsessively, created levels obsessively, and became (perhaps unwittingly) students of the "dark art." "Before I got a job as a level designer," says Matt, "I spent every waking, nonworking moment creating scenarios and environments for Doom, Duke 3D, and Quake. Because I had to work to keep my apartment and to keep from being malnourished, I didn't have much actual 'free time' due to my habit. I figured, well, if I combined my habit time with my work time, I would have a lot more free time. But, now that I'm a full-time level designer, I have even less time than when I was struggling to make money. It's funny how things work out." What does it take to be a GSE? Scads of articles focusing on this question have appeared over the past few months on the Web, but I'd like to offer our answer here on the Prey team. Prey GSEs must first and foremost be passionate about the play experience--they must care deeply about the quality and texture of play. They must also understand how to craft a game experience--how to balance things like challenge, risk, reward, interest, pacing, and visual excitement. They need to possess a very technical mind and understand, at the most basic levels, how our Prey technology works. They must be able to utilize portals in the best way possible, be able to balance texture variety, polygons, and visible actors to maintain the best possible game performance. They must also be students of architecture and drama. Architecture, because they create the world the player lives in during their Prey experience--those worlds must be consistent, realistic, and visually exciting. They need a sense of drama, because they are sculpting a fearful, wondrous, and exciting play experience--but there are so many ways to deliver drama: visually (with lighting and architecture), aurally (with sounds and music), and dynamically (via surprise, building tension, challenge, etc.). Most important, though, is our GSEs' ability to instinctively balance all of these myriad variables to craft our Prey game experience--to take all of the building blocks we give them, plus all of the variables which effect the moment-by-moment quality of the gameplay, and build the game. It's quite a tall order, and the pressure is most certainly on them.
Martinus adds: "Any mapper for any game must have the 'feeling.' You cannot learn this at any school--you either have it or not." "Personally," explains Matt, "I feel that a level designer cannot be a successful one without having knowledge about how a game works. Making things look pretty is one thing, but it's a small fraction of making a great 'level.' Level designers must be artists and hard-core gamers, at the utmost minimum. Anything less and their levels will lack in one area or another. Here on Prey, we set out to make the most real, interactive, cool, amazing, alive, and different environments that have ever been created. I have no doubt that we will succeed with this."
I'm Proud of My ToolIt's often been said that the work of craftsmanship can only be as good as the tools used to create it. Try to throw a vase on a substandard wheel and you'll get a pile of goop, no matter what your skill level. But, put a master potter down on a perfectly tuned kick-wheel, with the flywheel in perfect balance, and a delicate vase will emerge. Preditor is our own in-house tool that we've created to sculpt the worlds of Prey. Our GSEs use it to create the architecture and environments for the game, to import actors and entities, and to script all of the game's interactivity. Preditor is still a work in progress. Last year, Preditor evolved out of the design discussions between William and me. We managed to design a great foundation for the tool, but in all honesty, we were limited in experience, and the tool was evolving into sort of a 3D version of the Build editor, since that is what we knew. Also, since we hadn't spent months in the trenches with Worldcraft or 3D Max, there was a lot of editing functionality that we just didn't know we were missing. It's funny when I think back now, but in December '96, we had a huge design doc for Preditor that covered every aspect of the tool, from user interface to buttons, menus and dialog boxes. It's almost embarrassing how off the mark I was with that doc.
Tooling Along..."Just like any 'work in progress'," explains Matt, "Preditor has bugs. Being not only a level designer, but a tester too, it is the GSE's duty to seek out the bugs and do our darndest to break Preditor. Sometimes we set out to do just that, but sometimes the bugs find us and that's when it tends to get frustrating." "I definitely enjoy helping to design and refine Preditor as a tool," admits Martinus. "It is the best thing that can happen to a level designer if he can be part of the creation of the editor for the game. Right now, the only problem is that [programmer] William [Scarboro] has so many important things that he has to take care of that we sometimes have to wait for a feature we want." "With new tech you can't do everything you want to do," says John. "It is an endless cycle of compromise and work-arounds. As a game developer you have to be very flexible. I really enjoy working with Preditor because it is like nothing I have ever used before. It doesn't get in your way and it doesn't have 100 buttons to figure out. It is very clean and allows you to be creative. You have a nice big screen of game-quality 3D geometry that gives you a constant feedback on the look and feel of the area."
Matt is a bit more frank. "Working with a 'work in progress' can drive anyone crazy with all of the bugs that are constantly crawling around," he says. "But I seriously can't think of another editor that can stand up to it. We are taking all of the cool features in all of the great 3D programs out there and putting them all in Preditor. It is ultra easy to use. Any feature we don't have now, you can bet that it'll be in by the next week or so. William is cool like dat." "Preditor has by far the best 3D features that I have seen so far in any editor," gloats Martinus. "It has huge potential, and a lot of very useful and never-before-seen features will be added in the near future so that it will be the state-of-the-art editor. Another point that separates Preditor from the rest is that everything (lights, triggers, paths, actors, etc.) works in the editor. This is probably its most outstanding feature."
The Agony and the EcstasyOne of our biggest problems in Prey, and the source of our greatest frustration, is the fact that we're developing and refining our technology at the same time that we're creating our game. The GSEs clearly bear the lion's share of this frustration, because they are the ones who "sculpt" our technology, and if something isn't yet finished, they either have to make educated guesses and press on or wait for the coders to catch up. "Working with an engine that is still being worked on tends to be a bit frustrating sometimes," confesses Matt. "Some things we would like to see or try can't be put in until code-A gets implemented and code-A can't get put in until programmer-B does his work and programmer-B can't start until code-A gets in, etc...There are times when you envy all of the development teams using the 'game-in-a-box' Quake engine, that is, until code-A finally gets in and you can't even remember how bad Quake looked anymore." John chimes in, too: "Developing and working with new tech can be both frustrating and exciting. Creating new tech and a game utilizing it at the same time is a very daunting task. The little rewards we receive during the process are worth the heartache. As we put a new piece of the puzzle together the entire team often gathers to gawk at the accomplishment. Watching our technology solidify and do things that no other 3D engine has done is the most rewarding aspect of my job."
Hangin' in the TrenchesNothing sucks up the man-years of game development like creating the play environments for an action game. Not including all the R&D and experimentation, it can take well over four man-years to create, populate, and test the environments for a game like Prey. With that much time at stake, our GSEs really need to think through their work carefully, both before they flare up Preditor and when they're knee-deep in portals and extrusions. A pic is missing here "In creating an environment for Prey, I first start with the story," says John. "This is where I get my initial ideas that I will jot on paper as words and sketches. From the ideas, I begin constructing the general layout, which includes the critical path. After the general layout for the entire area is complete, I portalize the environment. This takes what would be considered a level and breaks it up into room components. Portals separate the various room components. At this point I can share the design with [artists] Scott [McCabe] or Steve [Hornback] so they can create textures if needed. As I texture rooms I also add the remaining details. After that, I'm ready to do my favorite part, lights. Lighting is when the world becomes a real place for me. When lighting is complete I place the actors and items and then it's ready for testing and tweaking." "The first thing I think about is what I want to 'say' with this level and what the player should feel at the moment when he finishes the level," explains Martinus. "Then I kind of meditate and write down everything that comes to my mind. I try to feel the whole world that I want to create with all its aspects. I try to smell it and feel it. Then I sort out the ideas and write down a rough overview. I also have some situations and scenes that I want to build in at some point in the level. After this, I start editing. I go back to meditating. I do this back and forth until I am satisfied. It's a time-consuming method, and sometimes I delete an area five or more times until I am satisfied. But I prefer to spend more time on one level and have a really outstanding map than doing five crappy maps in the same time."
Revving the Engine and the Story"As opposed to some other projects out there," adds Matt, "Prey will have an engrossing story. Because of this, the traditional job for an LD isn't exactly the same. Paul writes the overview story and we have to build off of that. Now granted, if one of us comes up with a kick-ass idea, it will get worked into the story somehow. But the most important job for a GSE is to take all of the ideas and story elements and make them real. Make them breathe and move and exist in Talon's life. This is the most fun part." "As soon as Preditor is finished," explains Martinus, "the most time-consuming aspect will be balancing, tweaking, final lighting and texturing, and the monster placement. When it comes time to finish the map, I load it up, up to 500 times, and always make little changes until it's perfect. Also the planning sometimes takes very long for me." "One thing I certainly don't miss is vising," says John. "This is also one of the coolest things about Prey--the fact that all geometry is dealt with at run time. As a GSE, I try to take advantage of this fact. I try new things and always ask myself, 'Could this be done with a BSP engine?' I am constantly challenging myself to do new and different things. I want to give the player a new experience, so I feel it is important to ask yourself, 'What can I do that hasn't been or couldn't be done before?'"
Foundation FundamentalsBack when I lived in the cornfields of Illinois, one of the cool places we liked to visit was the old Purrington Paver brickworks. It was a huge brick factory that, from the late 1800s to the 1920s, made bricks for road-paving and construction. Spooky thing was, it just shut down one day, in the middle of operations. You can hike back through the weeds and see the old buildings and it's very creepy--loads of bricks destined for Mexico City are still waiting to be picked up. Even a brick car is stopped halfway through the massive kiln. Rumor has it that the old brickyards are haunted as well--the spirits of those workers are said to be frozen there, endlessly making their bricks that will never get finished, never get sent out... What they did there was make bricks--the finest paving bricks in the world for their time, but they didn't make the cities or the buildings...For a lot of us here on the Prey team, we're like those brick workers...making the components, but our GSEs are actually using those bricks to sculpt and make the game. I can only hope that the rest of us on the team don't suffer the same fate as those Purrington brick workers... Until next month. Cheers! |