Most of us play video games. Let it be on the highest end PC hardware available out there, your favorite console, or just try to run those on some old hardware. Whatever it is, we all enjoy gaming, and sometimes, just admire these amazing virtual worlds that the game developers put together. During the time of writing this article, I’m working as the lead developer of Country Recalls. As a game developer, I’ll try to discuss how these amazing virtual video game worlds are built.
Game Development has often caused me to admire how powerful modern computer hardware can be. Just imagine, while playing a game, your computer has to render every single frame, do complex calculations, and also calculate physics and a lot more. And all of this is happening every frame. That means if you have 60 frames per second, all this is happening 60 times a second.
Now, let’s come to the topic. World Building. How these amazing worlds are put together.
All this starts with planning
The team plans on what they really want to create at first. What are we creating the world for? Will there be open scale gunfights? Or just some real close quarter combat? Or will it be just about racing? If it is about open scale gunfights, you want to make a scene with large terrains, a lot of hills, where on a CQB focused map, you would want some urban area with a lot of enterable interiors. Where will the map be set at? Afghanistan? You would want some sand, some dry grass at places. What about it being set at Kashmir? You would want some snow, the houses should be designed focusing cold, and it should be warm inside them.
Real life references really come in handy
While working on the scene in the image below, we tried to create a scene where the protagonist’s dad and his uncle were gossiping. Generally your relatives come to visit you during get-togethers. During get-togethers, the houses in Dhaka City are generally decorated well. Sometimes there are some warm lights which are used only during evenings. Before I started working on it, I examined my own home and tried to visualize the lighting conditions, the way everything is. Any type of scene you work on, real life references will always come in handy and help you make the scene come to life.
Then comes designing the terrain
The terrain is basically the ground, the landscape. This terrain is the base of the map. The houses, trees, grass, streets, everything is going to be placed on the terrain. But yeah, sometimes you don’t really need a terrain. For example, there’s no landscape in the scene above. Why? Because it’s an indoor scene. Nothing, but these walls, lights, and pieces of furniture matter here. In a game engine, there are tools for terrain. You can either sculpt it, or you can generate it using an external software like World Creator 2, or World Machine and export it as a height map in raw format, and import it in the game engine. I personally prefer World Creator 2. When you are working on hilly terrains, these really come in handy. But when it comes to flat terrains, with little bumps here and there, such as cities, it’s better to sculpt them. But yeah, generating terrains with World Creator or World Machine generally result in more detailed, and more natural landscapes.
Modelling the 3d assets
The 3d assets, such as houses, cars, etc. are modelled using software such as Blender, Autodesk Maya, and Autodesk 3ds Max. Maya is probably the most used in the gaming industry. I personally use Blender because it’s free, and I have a lot of experience in it. When it comes to games, one thing we have to keep in mind is optimization. This also applies to 3d assets. These assets are made of vertexes. The lower the amount of vertexes are, the lesser difficulty will be there while rendering it. While working on these assets, we always have to think about the real life counterparts. Such as, while making a house, I often made a silly mistake, that is I forgot about windows. As a result, there wouldn’t be good lighting. Nowadays, it’s improving.
After modelling, comes texturing them.
What is a texture? A texture is basically an image that can be used on a 3d asset for the colors on it. Here’s a texture below:
The texture resolutions affect the performance. The higher the resolutions are, the more demanding they are. But yeah, there’s always a way to optimize your textures. There’s a software called substance painter which is used for texturing assets. Personally, I use it to texture most, if not all of my assets.
Level Design
Great! You have all your assets ready, time to put them into the scene. Level designing is basically putting all the assets into the scene. It’s is probably one of my most favorite parts of game development. Level Design has a huge impact on the gameplay. It affects how you’re going to play the game. Such as, if you have a map with tiny alleyways, the player will focus on CQB. On the other hand, if you have a scene that’s not that dense, it will be more suited for open scale combat.
Level designing is something that really benefits from observing the real world around you. For example, leaves tend to accumulate more under the trees. So you must have densely scattered leaves under trees, not under a bench. Dirt accumulates more in the corners of houses. So when you see a dirty house, with a lot of broken, or just old furniture, you know it’s been abandoned. Level design can even tell stories. Say you want to tell a story about an abandoned house. The placement of the furniture pieces can give you an idea about what happened there. You can even add some bullet holes, or blood at places to tell the player that the residents were murdered.
Lighting can literally turn your scene upside down.
Lighting the scene is really an important part of compositing your scene. You can make a really blank scene really great, just by ensuring proper lighting. Again, with the addition of ray tracing, it looks even better. One thing I am obsessed with, is god rays. These rays can really transform your scene.
Do you know exactly what Minecraft RTX improves? It is lighting. Just with the addition of improved lighting and reflection, one of the simplest looking games now look amazing.
In the end, game development is a difficult and tiring job, but a rewarding one.
One of the best feelings you can have, is the feeling that you get when you finally finish working on your map, and the beauty of it unfolds, when you spend hours programming, and your code finally runs. The proud feeling you get when you see your game unfold, it’s incomparable to anything else.
