When somebody says, okay, we need to add a door here, what's the first question that comes to your mind [in each of your disciplines]?
TL;DRA joking answer: each discipline lists the questions a request for a door raises, from whether it is needed to animation, collision, detection and variants, with the point that doors are far more complicated than they look.
Do we really need it? We need a meeting to talk. Are you sure?
For an artist, what is it going to look like?
And then we need an Excel sheet to define all of the departments that are going to need to work on that door, and then ETAs, and then add a two-week buffer for that ETA because something is going to go wrong. Something is going to go wrong, for sure.
Tech art, what's your question when somebody says door?
Either you want it closed, either you want it open all the time. That's what you want. Do you want it to open and close? No, you never want it to open or close. You want it to stay open or stay closed. You don't want the animation part of it.
You don't want to have the detection part of it. It's so complicated, because how do you deal with the collisions? Do they move at the same time as the door? What happens if you attach a gadget to the door and the door opens or closes? Does the gadget fall on the ground? Does it explode? Do you lose your gadget? How do bullets react with the collision? How does the enemy react with the doors when a door opens or closes in front of the enemy? Does it cut the nav mesh or doesn't it cut the nav mesh? Do we have that check in the game? This is just the tip of the iceberg.
Now, the best one is: this door normally auto-opens when you get close to it, except during mission stage three, if the dude said the door is now locked. And then we start with a door, and then one month later there's a co-op door, and then a month after there's a double door, and then another month there's going to be a security door.
Then there's a breakable one and a metal one that's unbreakable, one that locks with a key.
And once you think that it's rock solid and that you've seen every possible thing that could go wrong, you give it to QA, and within five minutes, they break it.
He looks at it and it's broken. And then, what does concept do with a door, really?
It can't be a simple rectangular door. You've got to see how much detail you can fit onto this door, how many decals you can put on it, maybe a warning sign on your door, how many panel lines you can put on the door. It can't be a simple metal door. No such thing.
Warning, this is a door. It opens.
Brittany, what do you think Pierre-Luc would say in the concept door review?
He would say it's not door enough, it just needs to be more door.