Roblox Developer Conference 2018 - Creating Worlds You Envision transcript

hello hello hello welcome to the 2018 design track the fact that I mean the fact that I'm even saying that just shows you how much we've grown the Genesis for this track is we're just noticing how you guys are just improving the quality on the platform and so we needed to get more serious with our material and this is part part of our way of trying to figure that out so one of the things I know that really comprises of design is aesthetics and one of the best people I know at roblox is Steven Jobe give him give him around prize he's the 3d lead on the art design team I personally worked with him on ready player one on the catalog and many other things and I think you guys will be in for a treat so without further ado Steven well that's a lot of people up here um so yeah guys are you enjoying our DC so far nice this is my first one both as presenter and just attending it so it's pretty crazy to see how big this has grown so my particular talk is gonna be about creating immersive and cohesive environments in your game and really achieving that in studio first going over the general this so think about this as a primer kind of going over the basics of design when you're making a game a lot of the big questions and narrowing down but before I go into that I kind of want to give you guys an idea of who I actually am my name is Steven Jobe my handle is roblox Imagineer I've worked for roblox off and on for about eight years I've produced a lot of the packages you guys are familiar with DES speaker the Red Cliff Knights a lot of those things I've also produced countless gear accessory for the catalog I've worked on some promotions like he mentioned RPO but generally I've just been part of the the asset creation war chest that we've done throughout the years at roblox but one thing while doing that I've also worked on other projects I worked on a mobile game called ninja time pirates which is an absurd game with a wide cast of characters from different time periods they all had to feel like they belonged in the same universe our job was to help greed breed some cohesion in our design I also worked on another game called jetpack fighter I get another game with a broad cast of characters and enemies the needed to feel like they belong together and separate from each other in terms of bad guy good guy I did fan art for a ruby for roosterteeth in this particular example I did two different styles with the same concept to kind of show how you can breed a different look with the existing product so that the reason why I'm telling you all this is can give you guys a primer to what this talk is gonna be about and where I come from on this so the first question I a lot of us asked or I asked you guys to think about is what makes an immersive world what makes you feel like you really belong in a game a lot of people can say whether or not a game looks good feels good feels like they can dive into it or not but it's harder for people to actually identify the individual reasons as to why a game is good or bad those questions plague developers while making the game - because you are oftentimes shooting in the dark unless you have a pretty good guidance or a pretty good rule set to base your decisions on that's what I'm gonna be going over here first and foremost before we start though I want to talk about thinking big in your design and in this talk start broadly with everything you do in your game and I'll get into more detail about what that means but you want to think globally with your first big questions then you want to go through your game and start using simplified proxies working in a non-destructive and flexible environment so that you can quickly test out every aspect of your game's design before laying down final textures material was lighting everything the reason why you do this because often times while you're designing your game while doing the art at the same time you'll find that you need to make these adjustments and instead of dealing with overly cumbersome assets that you've you know painstakingly set up working in a much more raw and flexible manner will get you a better result in the long run so let's talk about thinking globally I want to explain what I mean by that what I mean by globally is to think about the questions or the problems and challenges you're going to face that affect the game at the highest level that's everything from UI to UX to environment to gameplay design characters on the general user experience you want to think about these questions first before you lay down anything in studio so what are the needs of your game players one of the first questions you wanna ask basically what that means is what the heck is your game what is it going to be about like how is house a player going to play your game the next thing you want to ask yourself is what's the tone of your game what do you want to evoke in the player do you want them to feel safe do you want them to feel frenetic energetic like in an obstacle course game then you want to kind of think about how your players are going to see the world this means like if it's first-person perspective the way that the player is going to see the world and what you need to design your environment is different from if they're in third person or isometric so let's talk about that first question there are many types of games on roblox there's a obstacle course games everyone knows a good obby everyone knows about Alby there are plenty of open world games sandbox style games there are also you know guided linear journeys games and an example that might be even the the egg hunt most recently and then the first-person shooter genre is also very popular at roblox we've got some really great games out there for that phantom forces so let's talk about the first I'm gonna kind of break down two specific examples and how gameplay decisions here affected globally your game let's talk about an open-world game one of my favorites out there is legends a lot of breath of the wild right now yeah any fans that came out here got a few awesome so this game is a masterclass in design it has it uses many points of interest dispersed across this entire environment but more importantly it uses obstructions and partial obstructions to both drive players to directions and push them away from others without ever telling the player where to go in your game your assets to use your environment you build should do the same thing you want your players to really feel like they know where they're going without you having to say a single word these games also more than anything else rely on heavy reuse of assets because these worlds are so big you want to use objects multiple times and down the road roblox will be implementing instancing which will make this even more powerful because objects will be able to occupy a lot less performance and less load time so your worlds can become a lot more robust a lot more vivid and a lot more real and open-world games will benefit most from that next is an obstacle course again a very popular genre on our platform obstacle courses in this case really need to have a clear play area and everything else that's in the environment needs to be clearly a set piece typically in most obstacle course games like Donkey Kong Country here the set pieces or the environment around the player that they're not directly interacting with are usually subdued pulled back and a lot less bright and contrasting than the current play space because you want the player to immediately recognize both the dangers and the opportunities in your environment while still creating an environment that feels robust and immersive more importantly your items depending on complexity or your performance of your game need to be one-to-one to their collision that means if you're worried about performance pull back on your environmental detail so that your collision is true your players will distrust your game if they can't rely on something that they see being something that they're going to hit next these this concept well I'm using a 2d example with Donkey Kong Country applies in 3d again if you're running down a path you want your play space to be clear and separate from the immediate points of danger or whatever they need to focus on so again that's gonna come up a little bit later when I talk about player focus so the next big question want to go over is tone in a game you can tell a player a lot about how they should feel what they're about to encounter the general experience of the game based on tone this can be great for an obstacle course where you want bright and colorful universe around you or in a first-person game where you want to build a mystery dark and moody light and playful in exam of some of the games like feed your pets that's out there and then you have mysterious and adventure style games all of these have different tones and all of them have different color schemes and treatments of their assets but again this is a global question you have to answer before you get to anything else because this affects not just the environment not just the character and not just the camera you're looking through the playing the game but the UI the general user experience the next question is a pretty obvious one when you're developing a game how is your player going to see the world is it gonna be a first-person shooter or even if a first-person perspective in general the way you layout your environment is going to be very different from say how you do a third-person game where you'd want to have indirect points of interest not immediately in front of the player so that they are forced to explore and look around in an isometric game you want to have your immediate foreground mid-ground which is a play space and your background to be clear and separated from each other so a player knows immediately upfront where they can play what's something they need to be aware of and so what something's just to help make them feel like to belong in the world to give you an example how good and bad perspective choices can affect the game I'm gonna use Witcher 3 Witcher 3 is a game that's typically in third-person anybody here play it before yeah it's a good gun yeah so this game's over the shoulder and it's very important that it's over the shoulder because it has a lots especially in combat you have a lot of points you need to pay attention to enemies don't just encounter you from up front they come at you from all sides and you to forget to pay attention to one more than one thing at a time that same game played in first-person immediately comes a lot more narrowed your focus becomes a lot more tunneled so your environment your your general approach to the game needs to be slightly different in the opposite direction Mirror's Edge is a great game for first-person use this game right here you use the first-person perspective to let you know where footfalls were going to happen where your hands were reaching they used it very effectively to otherwise communicate a very chaotic game in third-person you lose a lot of those visual anchors you lose a lot of that visual cue you player you can't exactly where they're going to land in first person you could so now that we've kind of talked about the big questions let's go over again what it takes to make an immersive world in practice in aesthetically you want your models to have a consistency in design that means if they're gonna be chunky or thin volumes if they're gonna be complex or very simplified you want consistency in your mesh and I'm talking specifically about the model that you have your environment assets characters and everything else devoid of any color or any lighting you do want your materials and textures to also be the same that means the actual materials your your your characters your environment use the textures decals everything else you want consistency in both complexity and color schemes and then you want a strong unifying lighting scenario so regardless of you using the current state of light or we were talking about future's bright which is just a much better version you are still working with a lighting system that can help unify or cause discontinuity in your environment oftentimes people think about you lighting last it should be one of your first things you think of so let's talk about model consistency real quick and then kind of break down what I mean by that what actually makes a mesh a mesh is essentially what you're looking at here these two character models and they gear they're carrying right now our meshes meshes are the actual models devoid like a set of any textures material or anything else that is just the the actual physical body of the the character there what makes this consistent is whether or not you are going to go on a detailed path or minimalistic you can take as you can see in the image you have a very complex character in the left the pumpkin Geist one of my favorites and then of course blocky on the right with a very simplified weapon their volumes and their are very different you have very thin very complex on the left very volumous large simplified on the right and then in most games one of the most unappreciated things to pay attention to is your silhouettes of your characters or your environment silhouettes what I mean and I'll explain a little bit more in a bit is essentially the same models everything in your environment devoid of any lighting silhouettes can come cade a lot to a player about how they should feel you have a lot of angles you have a lot of curvature a lot of organic it'll feel very different from something that feels very stout blocky and very square feeling silhouettes are also used oftentimes in games to help communicate what kind of character you're facing like overwatch for instance the silhouettes for all the characters drastically different from each other if you took out all their color you just made them black flat images you would be able to tell what each class and what each character is at a glance so let's kind of put this in practice real quick we've got blocky here in a very odd environment he's a very volumous very large chunky character in an environment that's very thin very detailed it doesn't feel like it meshes quite right however if we put him in an environment that has very similar levels of volumes very similar level detail he immediately feels like he's made out of the same stuff to the world he exists in this is very important because your player who is either the guy in the rights or the guy in left is gonna have a very different experience when they're in the world they'll feel like they belong here or they don't let's use another example in the other direction pumpkin Geist again very thin character very complex in shape with the blocky volumes has a similar problem in the other direction you immediately put him in an environment where he has the same level of detail again he feels like he's made out of the same stuff he feel like feels like he exists in the same world going to the silhouette say I mentioned earlier silhouettes are very powerful for communicating to you as the developers whether or not you're we've got cohesion and then with silhouettes I'm trying to strip out all of the additional noise the lighting and everything else so you can focus on just how everything looks together if you look at the left and you look at the right the two of very different silhouettes very different shapes the one on the left's a lot more straight lines a lot more simple shapes in it the one on the rights got a lot of thin volumes a lot of repeated detailed curvature this is what I'm talking about when I say model cohesion model consistency now that we talked about the mesh and kind of go ahead and get into the the texturing the colors and everything like that but I'm gonna talk about colors first because it's a very almost global choice as well and its impact stone and everything like that so before we even get to the minutiae of textures let's talk about color and why it matters color can do a lot to set tone and set mood in your game it can tell your players again whether or not they're in a sci-fi environment or if they're in a colorful like fantasy environment it can tell them where they need to go or what they need to ignore you can also do a lot to enhance the lighting of your game so if you have a game that has with current state of lighting which is fairly robust it has some limits the assets in colors you choose that the in the environment can help enhance that further where you may not be able quite get the color red you want like a neon district they used it very effectively by choosing these colors very deliberately on their assets now I'm gonna kind of go through how other games approach color and how that helps set tone Deus Ex anybody here play that yeah of course a lot of people have it's great game right Deus Ex uses a very muted subdued tone to create this sort of distressed aged environment that feels very different from something like Mass Effect which uses much more color and colors you don't typically see in your normal environment to make it feel like you're in an alien world legend Zelda uses very warm greens and soft tones to make you feel safe in a game that's otherwise pretty dangerous and if any of you guys have ever played games you kind of know when you feel safe and that's usually because the developers intentionally chose color lighting and the the general tightness of the atmosphere so you feel safe another examples of Resident Evil for a game that's generally pretty dark and scary these safe zones are usually much brighter lit and warm Ori does this as well in a game that typically has some free it uses color very effectively by the way if you guys want another masterclass on gameplay design character design this is another one it uses color very effectively to teach you both what enemies are and what kind enemies are and I'll get into that more in a minute so when you're developing a game you want to kind of figure out for consistency sake a similar hue a basic you were going to develop your game in the reason why this matters is you look in this room look around you real quick and look at the dominant colors you see in this room even if even on your own shirts on everyone around you there it tends to be a little brown a little bit warmer in here it's because the lighting and the environment around you is reflecting light the light that's coming off these isn't the only light that's hitting you that's drawing a breeding cohesion in your environment because it's real so you want to do the same thing here while your game can be colorful keep in mind that these things exist together and they will be bouncing off each other playing off each other constantly you also want to use complementary colors or higher contrast to help draw focus I'll show you exactly what I mean by about that in just a minute but it can be very useful to immediately tell the player where they need to look where they need to go or what they need to be afraid of and you want to choose generally a similar level of saturation oftentimes we'll use the best asset or what we think looks great by itself this tree looks fantastic you've got this wonderful looking character over here you this building looks great but you have to think about your environment holistically everything together because nothing exists in a vacuum when you're making a game so to give you an example of how color can help drive player focus let's use mirrors at mirror edge again mirrors edge if we blur this image you can immediately tell where the focus of the the play is right now the higher brighter Reds are stand out greatly from the surrounding much cooler softer whites that are behind it so even if you can't really clearly see what's going on you already know what you want to focus on by our very nature we tend to focus on something that stands out for instance your yellow shirt stands out really well it's poppin' enemies do enemy designs like I mentioned in Ori they use color to immediately make them recognizable not just from the environment but from each other because often times you will have different enemies and you need to know at a glance what you're about to face this game and other games like it they use color make you feel smart tell you what you're about to encounter without ever saying a word another great game is ninokuni it uses color very effectively to generate a path in a cityscape that's generally pretty hectic it uses the brightness of the road that your character is walking on surrounded by a much more dimly lit less saturated environment so you let the player know kind of where the play space is where they can walk this can be very effectively used in Abhi's this is an example of where the play space is brighter more clear and the environment the set piece behind it is much dimmer so the player knows where they are where they can play and what's just for pretty now that you kind of we talked about colors holistically and how they can drive player focus and how they can also diffuse player focus and how they can kind of set mood and really let your player know where they're at let's talk about specific texture roblox has a robust tool box developers you guys can all flow textures and stuff like that the often times we will think about the texture that we want on a particular item but before you do that you want to think about how this is going to work again holistically is your texture library that you use in your game the the decals that you use the overlays that use on UI are they gonna be photorealistic a cartoony do you want to kind of figure out your palette early as possible again this could be pers own but generally speaking you want to figure out the tone of your game in the palette and by palette I mean the general color range you're looking at for your game and then you also want to decide early on if you when you use baked in or real-time lighting studio has a fantastic real-time lighting system and I would encourage you guys to use it but sometimes actually painting in or baking in your lighting either through a third-party tool or whatever method you want can help enhance otherwise for instance legends on a wind waker the HD version they implemented at a dynamic lighting system but they also use baked and lighting to help enhance that further where they knew there was going to be no change in light real time was used wherever they it was subject to change now they kind of talk about how this works in practice let's take a look at the two examples first we'll take a look at an extremely simple and and fairly unified color scheme the environment here all uses very flat colors that generally is a very cream cue the objects all have the same level of detail the character is a little bit more detailed than the rest of the environment because it's the one that I want you to focus on in this case the there's no painted lighting in this environment and it's also generally the same level of saturation now we go a different direction and much more detailed way we have this character in an environment that's much more detailed much more colorful and a broader range of colors but it's still unified you still have purples and oranges as the dominant colors you have green and therefore the ground but even it's subdued so that the highest contrast is on your characters and anything you want focus on now that we've talked about textures we talked about meshes kind of talked about the the high level stuff I wanted to talk about lighting because it's often times at least in my opinion one of the most disregarded things it's considered last minute of Polish it should never be considered polish in your very core can help route everything together or cause it to feel like it doesn't belong so a great example is the image to the left or to the yeah my left your right its Toy Story in this it's a great example what I'm talking about these toys here exist were developed and manufactured from different manufacturers if we're meant to feel like they came from different different places and different families have different stories behind them however the lighting materials and everything else that they used to help bring them back together you have fur you have plastic all these things still feel like they belong in the same world because they spent time to make sure the lighting helped route them together they also used lighting and other in other movies like them to help set the tone of the the environment whether or not they want to feel fun and playful or is this something I need to be afraid of I'm gonna show you guys four examples of the same scene with different lighting the kind of express what I mean all four of these examples are using the exact same scene this is using the current state of lighting our current state of studios lighting I'm gonna show you an example later that can be both done in current state and future's bright but this can be done in current state this image right here the only things that have changed are the directions of the lights the skybox and that's it so the top left image is default when you drop right into the pilot pirates default scene the top right I just shifted it tonight's change mister some of the the latitude and the lighting settings and immediately have a different scene bottom left change the skybox again adjusted lighting so it enhanced the skybox and matched it and again my environment feels very different bottom right sunset same concept again just adjust your lights adjust your skybox and immediately everything in your world feels like it belongs together and is rooted in the same world to give you guys some great examples and roebucks games that have used lighting and in general everything I've talked about very effectively let's take a look at four examples first feed your pets is a great example of a game that used very simplified very chunky environment very blocky look it uses it in every level from the grey the size of the environment self to individual assets or even the spots on the drafts it's not textured it's all modeled in we also have a game like 2029 which represents a much more realistic much more distressed take the lighting is is is much more subdued not so bright the textures and the the materials are a lot like I said more distress so it feels aged in a little you know kind of futuristic we take this game right here rip your toaster it's a great Cathedral scene that has it feels dilapidated old but still comfortable and I really want to point this one out because this one in the top right one use lighting the current state of lighting to create a lot of depth in your scene which is very important for helping your player know how big the environment is and in this case on the bottom left whether or not it should feel safe or not and then a game that uses lighting a little less aggressively but still uses it effectively along with materials and Texters is a bootleg buccaneers it uses this to create a similar level details to your environment and everything in that feels like it belongs together even characters a lot of times will feel like they belong despite how they look now that I've kind of gone over the basics now that I've kind of talked about everything else the the high level narrowing down to the specific examples of color and lighting and texture I'm gonna kind of show you guys an example of how this works in practice so I built a a basic demo scene to show you this whole thought process from the beginning to end so first I wanted to figure out what my game was going to be in this case it's gonna be a first-person sort of adventure game I looked at games like destiny and whatnot for a reference on this one I drew up a really rough really quick top-down view of how the gameplay was going to play out with different points of interest general idea where the lighting was going to be and my primary point of interest or my primary focus after that I wanted to think about the next global level thing which was tone color and the general mood I wanted to produce with this this game this was very important because I wanted my player to both feel missed the mystery of the scene but also comfortable next once I kind of figured out those high-level things I wanted to put it in practice and by doing that I use what I mentioned earlier which is called grey boxing so what I did is I grabbed toolbox assets or whatever I had simple primitives in some cases and slopped them together into a scene while keeping it very fast and flexible these objects were literally just things they threw in and pulled out the textures and the materials from so that could kind of figure out and test whether or not my concept worked and I found out that I did make modifications here and there I needed to move trees around movement points of interest everything so that I could kind of force the player to look at direction without ever having to tell them to do so this again helped me test for mobility and focus as well I found out that a couple of times I needed to pull things pull back the skybox for instance so after I kind of figured out the grey boxing figured out that my gameplay generally were I wanted to go and start setting about to set the tone set the mood of my game to do that I used the wonderful future's bright system that we have in works but this concept still applies with the current state of lighting as well so I went ahead and set up the lighting in my scene started yes I started with broad level high level like just kind of figure out what the direction the light was going to come from and in my concept I had the light generally behind the primary point of interest found out that that detracted from the point of interest so I moved it off from where the player was going to be looking initially so the brightest highest contrast in the scene was this single object in the background I used to also set the the tone that I had which again was supposed to be mysterious and and and drive player exploration and again at this point I still avoided encumbering myself over incoming myself with textures and materials again when I've said that people treat lighting is polish and I don't think he should this is why I can already tell what the the scene the tone and everything I'm trying to build with this environment before I even start setting down specific things now once I've done all that once I've tested and verified once I've refined and moved things around and really felt like I was happy with where was that I said about refining and polishing the scene in in this I used you know simple trees because I wanted to keep the same reinforced blocky chunky environment that I had overall I used the lighting to help bring down the brightness of the environment immediately around the player so that the object in the background the pillar itself was the brightest and clearest object to the player now I never told the player they can't go straight ahead but when a player jumps into this the first thing they're gonna see the highest point of interest is this which is there to encourage them to go there that's how you want your game to feel that's what immersion is it's never about telling the player where you want to go it's about using your environment using your assets and all those choices to drive them there and let them get there on their own now before I get to the thank you I want to appeal to each one of you guys the reason why I wanted to set this presentation up is roblox is a community of great games and great developers we can all work together to become better and help each other by helping our individual games by putting focus into the design your game and your own individual assets your own world you were helping your neighbor your neighbor is helping you and as we elevate the roblox visual platform how everything looks to an external user who knows nothing about studio the popularity of individual games and studio becomes greater so what you're doing is not only helping your game look better you're helping it do better so in my things I also want to point out several games are great examples of both lighting textures materials general aesthetic choice and cohesion in the environment for instance neon district was a great example I used it pretty heavily bootleg Buccaneers it's a great example of textures and materials life of an otaku is great about setting tone mood with your lighting innocence again the same thing it used it very effectively also to scare you and drive the players focus from place to place and then egg hunt used it very effectively everything very effectively to help you feel these very different worlds but you still felt like you're playing one big game so if you have any questions at all they'll feel free to ask but my hand right here is roblox Imagineer and I am on Twitter that I set up like three days ago so a lot up there and then of course on roblox so I'm open to any questions if you guys have any sweet I like this yeah yes Deepak what are the games that you grew up with a jury win and made you want to be who you are today so one of the earliest examples that can think of his legends not a Link to the Past it was a very the game itself was still to this day holds up because they spent a lot of time making sure that everything their game felt like it was made of the same stuff the materials you know the the trees everything felt like they belong together that's so that's a great example to me mass affected it really well Mirror's Edge is a great example of that kind of stuff I can go on but you know there's a lot of games that I pick out things that at the time I knew they were great games but I didn't know why I didn't know why they appeal to me visually until I really started thinking about these questions and the questions they themselves asked them and answered in those games yeah yes again yeah what software do you use to make objects what do you mean by lighting and everything like that so if you want again you want to use real-time lighting when you can but if you use baked-in you can either use X normal you could use Maya blender all have the capability of baking and lighting you just set up a lighting rig or in my case I typically like to just go ahead and use 3d coat or ZBrush or any kind of programmer you can paint on the model and I paint in the shadows yeah it's I my personal preference is to do painted because I like that discrete control anybody else no awesome yes you you were shown where you do a lot of 3d design have you had practice doing any 2d design yeah yeah so when I did 2d design the same concepts typically applied here doing sprite work or in fact jetpack fighter while being a 3d game was treated in a 2d environment so we realized and I can see if I can go back to it real quick give me a second guys when I actually used this as an example we when we first designed this game we realized we ran into problems where readability was I can click on it eventually readability was important but we wanted to have the ability to manipulate camera on the fly so it's more like 2.5 D but we applied the same concepts we did here the environment as you can see is much more subdued especially when you get to background in fact there's almost just flat shapes because we wanted the immediate play space of where the characters were to have to be the thing that you focused on yeah any more questions yes Deepak other Deepak not the same going into your background what kind of things did you study or type of schooling you went to to get to where you are now so I went to school for meteor arts and animation because I didn't know what I wanted to do at the time I was like I want to work at Pixar I didn't want to work at Pixar I wanted to work in games but I knew that I wanted to work in art and I worked in that I went to school for that because it was very broad I thought we learned about sculpture we learned about how lighting impacts things we learned about general color theory so it helps to just look at these things that you wouldn't immediately associate with games in fact there's a GDC demo I point out over here they talk about interior design and how it impacts environment design because these concepts applied in games work just like they do in the real world so a lot of the stuff that I did was a real-world media and then I moved into digital after that anymore yes for doing game design and everything and let's say you're doing it just as assets you don't want to be the one doing any of the script and how do you recommend getting your foot into the industry so oftentimes if we want to talk about roblox that's a hard question to answer it's different for each area but you want to try to either go in as an intern at some of these some of these places or as a prop model or prop model is that usually the low level you're creating basic assets but at one teachers use a pipeline specifically for that game how that company operates but it also kind of get you generally aware of how the process works in games so prop modeling is usually a good place to start yeah oh when you were showing like the blocky character that was with like the slimmer like tree and that like more detailed sort I it almost looked like well to me personally I kind of liked the look of that a lot because it looked like the character didn't fit into the world yet he still did yeah so have you like seen any games that I've been able to use the idea of like breaking the rules of lighting and all that stuff in color and what are some examples of that and how can you like break the rules while making it good within the rules I guess so that's a good question I can't think of a game right off the top of my head but there are games that you use it very effectively even in those games though there's usually something like I mentioned about four or five things you can use to unify your game even those games break they never break their rules they Bend them they break them for one or two things the models might look different the textures might look different but they still use the lighting that's the same they still use the materials the same because they're they're still trying to breed a world that feels like it's immersive even if they're breaking their own rules I can you know put up on Twitter once I can think of them some examples of the particular games that do that oh yeah yeah Marya odyssey the world with this oh yeah it's a good example yeah the the new dunk city is a great example of them sidestepping that issue you have Mario who's supposedly human and he's an environment that looks very human but instead of ever actually confronting that directly they just built a game that looked like it was built off the same stuff like the characters had looked different the environment look different but still look like it was built of the same stuff and I want to point out specifically the game used lighting very effectively to make it still felt like it belong together Toy Story is a great example again when I'm often building maps I find it hard to cut off the zone where the player is supposed to go okay what are some good ways to do that like often I'll make it on an island there's nothing else for them to walk towards but I tend to overuse that so what are other ways to limit the area they can explore so the first thing I would do is discourage and by that I mean build is an environment that looks like there's no reason to go there to obscure its you want to use objects to make it feel like they can't get there yes players will still try to go there and you might want to mitigate that with either invisible colliders or something like that but again like breath of the wild in games like that they encourage you and discourage you based on obscure insan' deterrence or yeah deterrence so basically the items don't look like there's something of interest thing just looks like it's clearly in the distance and there's something immediately blocking your path say building hills dense tree coverage that kind of stuff can be used to create guide rails that aren't actually boundaries also I want to point out lighting can be useful there as well you can use a dimmer lighting light up the areas that's a play space make the dimmer space something that doesn't necessarily feel like it should be of interest and all these things can be used to drive interest to one area and deter interest for another area and if you do those two together you should be able to provide your players a space they feel like they belong in and basically they feel like they don't really want to bother with any other questions yes okay so a lot of games recently I found I don't like the way they look because for instance sorry Odyssey is another example they have the play space in the world and then there's just a skybox and you can kind of just see where the world falls off and I've noticed that a lot recently and I just I think it kind of goes along with what he's asking about how to get the world to feel like it's seamless or anything yeah do you like it's the endless but put a boundary still without having that drop off into the edge and breadth of the world is another example because on one side you have the ocean which is great and on the other side you have mountains and you can't climb but on the very top there's a big chasm that never looked right yeah it always felt like there was a should have been something on the other side yeah so tips so you kind of pointed a couple tips they didn't do it in all their areas but one they used high high environment that was very vertical so the player didn't feel like they could actually climb it in the player through that game knew how far they could climb and they saw something that was well out of their range they were discouraged from going there then it of course used physical blockers like invisible colliders and warning Sandia can't go that any further that direction ocean was another example the player knew they could swim a certain distance they made that distance insurmountable you could not cross that water so you want to kind of create those into those subtle intuitive limitations through either something that feels like it's just too far for them to go too far for them to ever you know consider going like I what's down there that really matters and then to create an endless environment usually what I suggest doing and in the environment I did I created some hills that created a sense the doing environment was going up and then back down so they would never see the end of the world and then I just layered that with simplified objects that were so far out the sky fog are the depth fog who is making it feel like it was just endless but these objects were just in fact in very distance they were just fears just fears in the distance and cubes are off in the distance they were so far out the player didn't feel like they could get to him but they still helped make it feel like it went on endlessly mm-hmm all right cool that's all the time I've got for I can answer your question offline if you'd like like I said take a look at GDC demos take a look at the future our DC demos I'm hoping we can do more of these in the future and if you guys have questions specific things you want to go over just let us know because you know next year we might want to do more specific talks thank you guys so much [Applause]