Garshasp Development Blog

(Well, one of them for now…)
I thought I’d post the presentation I used for my talk in the conference on game development held at Sharif University a couple of months back.
It’s about the decisions you have to make and the things that you should do at the beginning of a game project, to make your team’s and your own lives easier later on and throughout the development cycle. This is an ongoing experience and collection of ideas for me, so I’ll be looking forward to any suggestions, discussions, critique, humiliation, praise and/or whatnot!

For months we saw ourselves come to the same major question whenever we wanted to plan for the level creation tasks. The question was basically, “Where should we start from?”.

There are always at least three main poles which need proper attention in order for a well balanced output, these are 1- Visuals (Graphics) 2- Game Play (Fun factor) 3 – Technical Feasibility (coding). If you want to create a level which looks great, is really fun to play and can be created considering the technical constraints or project constraints, then the three elements seem like they form a closed loop and it would be hard to decied where exactly the process should start from. Should we worry about the visuals first? Should we see what we can achieve technically and constrain the rest or should we consider the fun gameplay elements and then add the other layers?

There seems to be no strict answer to the above issue and after lots of discussions, we came up with a specific methodology to perform which we are following currently. Seeing a presentation from this years GDC from the Bioware team which was used for Mass Effect 2 strengthened our selected methodology.

What we are doing currently is to come up with the general visual concepts first, prepare the first phase for the level map which is 2D and then a 3D spatial map using boxes, fill it with the first stage of 3D models, play test the crude (un-textured) level in the game and implement the necessary code features and then re-iterate the loop by polishing the concepts, the 3D elements and gameplay testing and level design tweaking.  We have planned for four iterations. So far it seems to be a good choice although we need more time to really be able to tune the methodology and level development pipeline.

This task is very critical since it requires very close collaboration between members of different departments. Its quite fun also.