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
and production considerations as rapidly as possible, and proceeded to build the game.
As game engine details and technical factors evolved, so did the design. This is common.
We had the opportunity to use established characters and to create new ones. We
were entirely responsible for environmental setting and execution. The world and
characters needed a consistent look. It is immediately obvious when “look” planning
fails. In our case, the look planning faltered. With the visual capabilities of consoles
and the PC today, the lack of a consistent look is entirely unacceptable.
Because we were prevented from completing even a condensed previsualization
phase, many details, despite our best efforts, were left hanging to be considered midstream
in the heat of development. This did indeed create a stall factor, which burns
valuable resources. When layers of approval phases are introduced, sometimes this
stall is close to inescapable. However, as game developers, you are always looking to
minimize this kind of development impact. One way to minimize the stall factor is to
use your best efforts to build a previsualization sequence into every development
schedule.
INTERVIEW WITH ANDREW HOLDUN
Andrew Holdun is an extremely versatile and talented artist with a track record of making hit games
for developers like LucasArts, Disney, and THQ. His work can be seen in Jedi Knights for the PC and
Shadows of the Empire for the Nintendo 64. He received a B.A. in Architecture from Pratt Institute.
TM: Is getting ready for the game industry the same as preparing for a bullfight?
AH: I read a lot of Ernest Hemingway … and drank a lot of tequila. Before you knew it, I had a
cape and a hat with these stupid furry balls on it, and I was running for my life from a ton of mean
steam-snortin’ mammals.
TM: Nice. How is previsualization usually done? Is it important?
AH: I think that previsualization is becoming more and more important in all aspects of the
computer graphics area—from movies and TV to web and game development. In fact, I think that
it has trickled down from movies and TV commercials as a descendent of storyboarding.
While storyboarding has been accepted for a long time in those areas, it’s taken a while for that to
seep into games. As games have become more cinematic and more complicated, there has developed
a need to use devices like storyboarding to express what is happening—for both the creators and
producers of the content.
While I was at LucasArts, the majority of the artwork was conceptualizing what was going to go on
in the game … the character’s look … the appearance of the environment. A lot of the timing was in
the script of the game and worked out as a trial-by-error function. Not really previsualized or even
storyboarded that much. To be fair, I believe that there was not even a lot or any previz going on at
movie studios at the time.
Then with digital tools, people started to cut apart storyboards and have them become digital
visualizations of the action in the movie or commercial or game. As movie studios like Industrial Light
and Magic [ILM] started using previz more, they went from cut-up storyboards (animatics) to rough
3-D visualizations of the movie/commercial/video. The benefits are numerous.