Antoine · Level Designer

I'll take it from the start. Basically, what we're doing is the initial process of creating a location. First of all, we get a pitch, and we have to create a level design document that goes around it, where we do a bit of research and we detail what the location will be about. And from our side, we also have to do some research like this one, where we try to just find interesting pictures on how to create the layout. It's a bit like what artists do with the image references, but for us, we're looking at the navigation and what cool things can happen here and so on. So what I'm going to show today is: I wanted to take an underground facility and connect it to one of the caves that we have, the new caves, that one big opening cave, and then try to make a connection between those two. Like you could go down into the underground facility and then you have a section that opens up into a cave and so on. So from the modular aspect of it, it's just one section of it that we'll be creating. I won't actually connect it to a cave, but it's just to show you guys the process. We start off with some of the pictures to explore some of the ideas we could bring into this location. And I was thinking here is this open space, and we have maybe some areas where you can go from the underground facility to this thing. Quite like this thing here, where you can see some part of the cave but you still have the underground stuff, that can open up to mix this and this image. So this is what I've been looking at on the side. Then usually we would detail all that stuff into a level design document. We'll also get the mission guide that would tell us what we would precisely be doing in there, but I'll let the other guys explain a bit more about this. In here, what I'm showing you guys is an underground facility. I took this because it's a well-known place that everybody knows about, and so it's quite easy to expand from. What I'll be doing is I'll just show you guys how this place works in general. We have a hub. This is the modular aspect of a location. In landing zones, we create very bespoke layouts, but in the modular aspect, we have to think about a hub section that has multiple connectors that are very similar, on which we create these modules that can snap to it. And then we can use the procedural tool to generate different types of [layouts]. So what I'm going to do is just take out one of these, and then I will have a few sets of white box elements on my side here, and then I will start to construct something. So as you know, in the universe, we have a bunch of sets that have metrics, which is very important for us, that everything just goes with the right metrics. And all these are preset things that we can use to create our location, where we will know that this will be the right metrics, the right space for us to use.

Andreas Johansson · Lead Level Designer, Persistent Universe

A small note, we do have a few more pieces to build our locations than the five that he just showed there. We have quite a few. Going back to what Jared said in the beginning, I think one of the reasons why people sometimes are maybe not so aware of what level designers actually do is that, to my knowledge, depending on which company you actually work in, a level designer does slightly different things. In certain companies, they are more like scripters. In other companies, they are more block-out people. So generally, here at Cloud Imperium Games, a level designer is a person who is part of the process from the beginning to the very end. He is part of the story when, like Antoine said, we get the kickoff and the narrative. We put together the level design document, which is a fairly extensive document that contains all the information that is required for a location to be considered fully functional. These documents are usually written by the level designer, and then I review them and sign them off. And after that's been signed off, we go into a white box phase, which is what we're seeing here. Part of the level design document is also doing what Antoine did, which is gathering reference images and just getting an idea of what we want to aim for. But then we move into the white box phase, and that is the creative bit. There are, in general, two parts to level design. There's the creative bit, which is blocking out the location, building it. And then there's the slightly more boring or tedious bit, which is the markup. And that is setting up all the volumes, everything that defines atmosphere in a space and determines if it has gravity or whatever it might be. I'm sure everyone at some point went through a doorway in Star Citizen and suddenly started suffocating for some reason. And that's just some level designer who missed our room system, and he gets a big slap.

Manuel · Level Designer

The same goes also for systems like the elevators, the trains, restricted areas, ATC, landing services. There are lots of things that come afterwards.

Andreas Johansson · Lead Level Designer, Persistent Universe

There's a lot of markup that we do in locations. Take, for example, the room system and the transit system. There are quite a few components to them, if you put it that way. So many times, the setup can be done completely correctly from our side, and it might break for some other reason. It could be object container streaming or whatever it might be that causes it, or it might be that there's some conflict with the layers, or there's a million things that can go wrong. So I think a lot of people who are outside of level design don't quite realize the complexity of certain things.