Ultimate Game Design : Building game worlds

Building Game Worlds
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U L T I M A T E G A M E D E S I G N
sections in your world can be tunneled through. You simply can’t predict where the
player will choose to do it! This is why many games have taken the approach of allowing
only certain sections (identified visually for the player with special markings
or details) of level geometry to be destructible by the player. In that way, you do
know where a player will be able to blow a hole in the wall, and you can play-test for
it and build and stage your scenes around it.
Enemy Hazards and Blind Data
An area related to setting up enemy actors involves setting up “enemy” hazards. Hazards
can take many forms: lava pools, acid pits, boiling hot generators; we’ve seen
each of these in many games. We want to be able to determine and edit how lethal
these hazards are to our hero characters, or to any characters we want affected or injured
by a hazard. This is often accomplished using what’s called blind data.
We can tag or mark areas or items in our scene with blind data that is then exported
from our art package and read by our game engine. We can create blind data
definitions in the blind data editor of our 3-D package of choice. Usually, we give the
blind data a name and ID number like Damage024. We might take Damage024 to
mean “lava pool surface damage.” We might be even more specific and create a blind
data type of lava_pool_d024. It’s important for your team to have file and data type
naming conventions (agreed-upon file-naming rules) so that everyone can understand
a type by looking at its name.
We also want to attach the blind data to construction elements in the scene, like
polygon faces, vertices, or objects. For our lava pools, we want the lava pool surface
to deliver damage, so we will attach our blind data to polygon faces (which make up
the lava pool surfaces.)
Next, we can associate our Damage024 blind data with a paint color. Usually, it’s
best to try to keep these consistent by type. For example, try to use similar colors for
similar kinds of damage (such as surface damage = red, items that cause damage = orange,
and so forth).
Figure 4-2 shows the blind data editor open with selected faces being “tagged” or
marked to be associated with our damage type of Damage024 (lava pool surface
damage in our example). We can then customize the values of the tags we have set
down or painted on polygon faces. We can edit them to cause more or less damage to
our hero character on contact.
NPC Actors
In previous chapters, you have seen nonplayer character actors used in games in a
number of ways: to tell backstory points and prompt the player along a certain pathway
through the game; to serve as a reference point; or to teach players game controls
and reveal specialties. More commonly, NPCs are becoming part of the minute-