Friedrich Bode

Well, when we design these locations, we always try to think about the long-term plan. So we already put things into our landing zones, even when the systems that they rely on are not online yet. For example, hospitals in Lorville: you already have the facade of a hospital and you cannot enter it yet. But we have that real estate already reserved for when the medical gameplay comes online, because otherwise we will have the system but we won't have the space, and we would have to somehow awkwardly squeeze it in somewhere and it wouldn't do it justice. So yeah, definitely. We also have security checkpoints, customs. We have that in every one of our landing zones and people always pass through them. And at the moment you're not getting scanned yet, but as soon as we have that functionality, we can implement that, and it is there. So it's definitely stuff that we think about when we concept these layouts, when we build these locations, so we don't run into that kind of trouble down the line.

It must be hard to include the things that you know are coming and then make preparations where possible for the things that are being considered. It's building for tomorrow as well as today.

Yeah, absolutely. And we have to talk to a lot of different people in different departments to ask them, hey, how do you envision this is going to work? In some cases we have very concrete information on how that's going to work. In some cases it's educated guesses, I would say, and we might have to do adjustments later on. But we always try to do our best in order to prepare for what's coming down the pipe later on.

There's a lot basically that we already white boxed and prototyped, and we had fun ideas like steam geysers and lava pools and all these nice things that could add more variation to them. And I believe these are definitely not off the table. We haven't gotten around to implementing them yet. Again, it depends on certain systems: abilities for the player to slide down slopes, to climb steep walls, to be able to swim, for a start. All these things first need to be implemented to add more traversal mechanics to the caves, so we have more interesting layouts and traversal challenges in there. More features for the actor status system so we can add hazards, like I said, lava pools and that sort of thing. So we definitely have ideas on that and some prototypes, and we just need to implement them for real.

So one more approach as well is we try to make stuff modular. So even these traversal challenges that Fred did, they are also modular. We can combine them. They can have different components, interchangeable, right, in the white box. And that's what we want to do across the board, right? Because hand-building something very specific and playing it once is pretty boring. But if you see something but you never really know exactly what it's going to be, and you have to analyze the environment to see what the best approach is, that's where it becomes interesting, especially exploration in dark caves with limited visibility where you have to bring your own light and stuff. It can be quite interesting once we get the opportunity to do that.

The secret entrance. Yeah, I think we started white boxing that one. Then it got deprioritized. But there's also a reason for it. We don't have the smuggling gameplay yet. So as soon as we expand on the law system so that certain goods are not allowed within the city limits of Lorville, for example, and basically you cannot get through customs with them, you cannot carry them inside, by that point it would make sense for us to add some of these secret entrances to the city. Right now it would just be another entrance and there wouldn't be much of a gameplay consequence to it, I guess. So as soon as we have that, such a secret entrance would get a much more important priority, if you want to say.

I guess it doesn't make sense to spend time working on back doors when at the moment you can walk through the front door with just about anything.

I mean, this applies across the board as well with any element. Like Fred mentioned in the beginning, we have the hospital facade for Lorville and other locations. We're probably not going to do anything about that until that system actually comes online. Because otherwise we would just build something without knowing how it's going to work. That would be inefficient.

We want to go and update several of our landing zones when we get new systems, like has been mentioned here several times. Removal of the no-fly zone and stuff like that is a bit more tricky. We're always going to have the no-fly zone for all locations. New Babbage also has it. It's just not as intrusive, as in your face, as it is in Area 18, for example. That's a big example, where the whole planet is pretty much covered by it. So the simplest answer is yes, we will go back to locations, we will update them. We also obviously see and hear feedback from players when we have released a location. It's really good to get the feedback in, and then when we want to expand this or we get time to expand it, it's like, what should we focus on? And then maybe we heard that this is the stuff that players find most interesting in this location. Then we'll make sure to focus on that first. So it's a yes and no question. We will go back, but we don't plan on making a complete rework of an old location as it looks.

Just to add to that, there are a lot of updates going into existing locations that are sometimes not that obvious to players. Remember when elevators were just traveling between two endpoints, and you had to go to a specific elevator to reach a certain hangar? Now, with transit system 2.0, we can change that around. There are performance optimizations. A lot went into 3.9, actually. We split interiors and exteriors for performance reasons. A colleague of ours is working on the restricted area with the feature team that's developing that. So that is being improved, and previously released locations are benefiting from that as well. It's just when it comes to tearing the entire layout apart or reworking large libraries of assets, that's substantially more work. And again, not to dismiss what Toby said, we are listening to player feedback and we definitely let that influence which locations we improve. But there are also certain things, the layout, it's just the nature of the location. Lorville is different from New Babbage. It is more of that big, chunky, industrial, low-tech mega city in the middle of the desert, Judge Dredd style. And New Babbage is a little more intricate, with the domes that are connected, more like little islands. And there are just some things that we won't change.

The lore obviously comes into it a bit as well. Lorville is a harsh location compared to other areas we have.

Art direction too, of course.

I think each one is going to give a little bit of input on that, because every level designer might work a bit differently in how they start. For example, some people like to do paper, some people just go into the editor, and some people maybe like to write down a little basic story based on what they get from lore, to identify it. I'm not the person who generally draws a layout. I do more of a flowchart of how I want the location to flow, and then I go into the editor and work in the 3D environment. That's what I do at least. That's how I start. And with the document, of course, that describes every detail of the location down to the tiniest screw.

Yeah, I think one thing that we all do, please disagree with me, Fred, if you don't, but we always start with the document, right? Which also has the requirements we get from the directors: what is this location, what's the main purpose of that location, et cetera. And then it's what Andreas said, we work a little bit differently. I also go to a flowchart as the second step, but I usually start with paper after that, and I don't go into the editor until I have a few paper-based designs that I'm feeling fairly good about. Then I start implementing them. For myself, that is.

No, I agree. Starting off with a document is super important, just to get an overview of what the contents of the landing zone are. What are the requirements from the different departments? Like, hey, we definitely need spots for these two mission givers, or these are certain shops that we absolutely need here. What's generally the art style and all that. So that's basically the foundation. Then a 2D layout, whether it's on paper or whether you use Microsoft Visio or something like that to create a flowchart or a very rough layout of where what is located. That's what I would do. You can go into more detail drawing top-down layouts in 2D, but with the tools that we have to quickly sketch in 3D, basically in our editor, what we call designer solids, we can quickly draw these types of environments in 3D, get a feel for them, jump into game, walk through them and see if they work.

This comes down a little bit to what we have talked about, how we add more content to our planets, and that obviously will help with this in general as well, because in the future we could have, for example, caves where you can drive in but you can't fly. And that obviously helps, where you would be like, oh, I need to buy this ground vehicle because then I can visit this place without danger, because it could be somewhere you can access with a vehicle but can't access without one, because you would freeze or, depending on the location, it would hurt you. That comes back again to what Andreas mentioned just now, where we're trying to figure out how to fill all of this, and that's why we don't have as much variation at the moment. We have a few different caves that we place, and in the future we want to add other sorts of caves, like ice caves and all that stuff. But until we do that, we obviously first need to figure out how to actually fill a universe. It's quite difficult. It's a big challenge to fill a universe as a level designer.

Also, for example, and maybe I'm speaking a little bit on behalf of other departments, when you have things like weather effects and planetary effects, you can have electric storms on a planet that basically ground every flying thing for the next 500 kilometers, but you still want to go in there, right? Then you have to get in a vehicle and you have to drive there. That's not necessarily level design, but this is the interplay of different departments and different elements of the development that can help create a unified experience, where we could provide the location the player has to go to, but the only way to get there is through the interplay of atmospheric systems and where the front's moving in, for example. So there's stuff like that. And like Toby said, of course, caves. You want to go into a cave and you can't fly in there. Walking might be too dangerous because it's full of dangerous gas or heat or whatever. So you get in your rover and you can drive in for X amount of distance, carrying all your equipment with you, for example.

Yeah, or a heavily fortified base on the planet's surface that has tons of anti-air missile batteries. So you are either very, very heavily protected against that in your ship, or you drive in with a tank, which probably makes more sense.

Why are the boxes so tight? We've come up with different metrics for the differently sized hangars. The thing is, the ship team keeps building ships, and basically the ships just keep getting bigger. Shout out to John Crewe and his gang. Basically, what ship is supposed to land where is not up to us. One thing that we have suggested is to add, for example, an auto-landing area on top of the hangar, so players who would like to be on the safe side and engage autopilot before actually being inside the hangar could do it already on the outside, which would make things a lot easier. This was a proposal by me, and I think the live design team also liked that, and it just needs to be prioritized and implemented.

I also think that we're looking at improving the general UI experience, so you have a few more helpers when it comes to landing in hangars. In the end, if I'm going to break the fourth wall, hangars are used for spawning and despawning ships. And that's why we also single out ships into one per hangar, because seeing ships popping in and out of existence all around you isn't fantastic.

For me, I can't talk too much about it because it's a future location, but to mention one that I really enjoyed working on, that was also the Surface Outposts. It was the first thing I really got to work on when I started here. And I quite enjoyed building those small areas to figure out what they could be, how they could work and stuff like that. Mostly for the experience. It was a really fun experience building them with the team and everything.

For me, it was probably New Babbage, basically building upon the stuff that we learned when developing Lorville and having that influence the new landing zone, coming out of the low-tech industrial streets of Lorville into something a little bit more shiny. So it was very cool. I think it's a nice landing zone. I like how it's come together, and it was fun working on it.

I don't get a chance to work on many locations, but I did work on GrimHEX way back when, and Area 18. And I do still have a thing for Area 18, because I like Blade Runner, I like cyberpunk. The neon and the grit and the dirt and the seedy elements of a city, that's what appeals to me.

As far as I know, there are plans to have wear and tear and various states depending on different types of interaction that might occur, hostile or non-hostile, with said outposts.

Yeah, and just think about all these other systems that are going to come online later, like power and atmosphere that could be disabled or enabled. Actually, this might be something I'm even more excited about than smuggling, or about as excited. Messing with the space station and seeing the effects, I think that's going to be cool.

I know this is quick fire, but when you look at the content that we want to do on the planets as well, we do plan to add everything from power to resource transfers to oxygen atmospheres. So when we build all this content, from the very tiny to the very big, we want to make sure that this also works across the board, right? Because we want to have an interactive environment, not just a static world that the player flows through in some kind of bubble.