Ultimate Game Design : Building game worlds

feedback from players and testers. Finally, as the level goals start to become more obvious,
do they help to support and enhance the original game vision or heartbeat?
We’ll discuss each of these important considerations next.
Adapting Architecture and Terrain to Games
C H A P T E R 2
If you have done most of your grid planning correctly, you’ll minimize the amount of
immediate reworking necessary as you begin to adapt or alter architectural features or
terrain features for your game. Remember that these features should always support
gameplay! This is why it’s so important for you and your team to have thought out and
committed to paper what’s really going to happen from a pure game-play standpoint.
If you have ignored or shirked this mental exercise, and not gleaned the details that
flow from it, you could end up with a very pretty architectural walk-through that has
no play value. Now, there is nothing at all wrong with a beautiful architectural
walk-through—if you’re in the business of creating architecture for clients. However,
we’re building games! We need so much more than a walk-through.
Hopefully, you won’t have doorways, windows, or pipe ducts that are too small
for your hero character to enter or exit. You won’t have bridges that are too small to
drive two cars side by side over when you’ve called for such functionality in your design.
However, even though you will have planned for certain geometry and architecture,
and will have built a prefab system to account for your designs, you’ll still find
that you need to add to or subtract from your construction set new pieces. It’s important
to think of your level construction set as your arsenal. Experiment. Try to do
amazing things with it. Hopefully, the transitions through planning from your paper
sketches have translated into a great starting point for building up your level further.
It’s not always the case, though. Maybe, despite your best individual and team
mental projections, your paper floor plans are not working out that well in 3-D. You
did the sketching, the concepts, and the gameplay notes, but the results didn’t work
out perfectly. That’s okay! We’re looking at basic traversal and navigation right
now. That’s what this phase is for! Remember, modern game design is largely about
elaboration and refinement.
With modularity and file referencing as your allies, you should be able to make significant
adjustments fairly quickly. These are powerful concepts. If you had built up
this level geometry in any other way, you might find yourself making edits by hand to
complex geometry. You might be trying to resize or trim geometry, somehow put it
back together without errors or leaks—any number of problems may come your
way. I can’t stress enough the power of file referencing and modularity!
Architecture edits for gameplay purposes become much easier using a modular/
prefab system of construction. For example, suppose that I’ve stamped 20 pagodas
all over my map. If I wanted to make a change to the pagodas, and didn’t use file ref
erencing, I’d have to approach each of the 20 pagodas on the map and make the changes
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Level Planning and Building