Technique for Creating Beautiful Level Design

hey noah here in this video i'll go over a design technique that can help create more picturesque spaces whether you're creating games or designing buildings also give some updates on how we are progressing with chef rpg jumping right in i want to create a new map this new map will be a corner wilderness map used mostly for hunting and foraging with maybe one or two houses for the npcs this map will be one of the game world boundaries and will connect with the first town map that we've made so here we've made an initial sketch i think the first instinct is to start creating a bunch of different assets and drop them in and this was how i went about it when i first started working on the game but after creating maps like this for a few months i realized that map layouts created this way typically lacked cohesion and consistency some objects ended up being too big and the general visual quality of the maps weren't as good as they could be so recently i've been using a new way of designing the maps that results in a more picturesque and visually appealing game and it's a technique commonly used in architectural design as well instead of creating separate assets and dropping them in a better way to go about designing a space is to create complete self-contained scenes in the context of this 2d top-down game the scene boundaries would be the size of the in-game camera using this method you are designing a scene through the eyes of what a player would see ignoring everything else outside of the frame for the time being we have to treat this scene like a standalone painting and put in all the details objects people and post-processing effects this will give you a much better idea of what the game will look like through the player's eyes allow you to create much better cohesion between the objects in the landscape and allow you to design objects with the right scale so they don't feel too big or too small when you are in the game so let's try it out and see how this works in practice i'm going to create a house for one of the npcs in our game right at the edge of the cliff here instead of drawing separate objects i'm creating a frame for what will be the game camera and only focus on finishing what's inside the frame everything outside of the frame doesn't matter right now we start by centering the character in the middle of the frame since the camera will usually be centered on your character and the character will always be standing on a walkable surface so you know you can't place obstructive objects where the character is standing then we can start drawing in the line work for the surroundings i'm starting with the house right away to get the size right to make sure we can still see most of the house inside this scene this is a simple house for one person with an a-frame entrance a couple of windows and some machinery for water and electricity after the house is drawn we can start drawing the landscape there will be a thin dirt road leading to the house with cliffs on both the front and back sides of the house after the line work is done we can block out the main colors in the scene to get a general gist of what this scene will look like now we can start filling in the details for now i'm just following the same grass and cliff textures i've used before if you're just starting a new project this is a great opportunity to create new landscape textures and assets after you've perfected the textures in one scene it's really easy to edit and reuse the textures for the rest of the game and here i'm just drawing in the road getting in all the details i can and finally finishing up the house it's a fairly simple wooden house with a metal roof for this drawing i want to keep the house relatively simple and let the grass and moss take over it which can give the scene a bit of that ghibli vibe the sense of nature taking over really adds to that picturesque feeling we are going for at this point we can see that there's a pretty good blend between the building and the nature and it's not just this hard edge like what we had in some of the past designs it looks pretty good so far but if we want this image to be a standalone painting it still feels pretty empty a good way to fix this is to fill up the scene with more objects and plants i'll just quickly sketch in any items that could be added first i think we should have some broken wooden railings around here since we are at the edge of a cliff since it's a home let's add a mailbox here the top right portion of the scene feels really empty right now so let's add some trees and maybe some bushes we can have a lamppost here as an object of interest and it will help make the scene come alive at night some more wooden railings around the stairs the scene still feels like it could have a lot more vegetation so let's start with some bushes scattered in the area and it would be nice to have some patches of flowers all around the scene currently the scene looks a bit dry with the somewhat limited color palette having multi-colored flowers will help create a more vibrant scene which again adds to the picturesque feeling finally this big bear cliff here doesn't look too interesting right now in this case it would be nice to add some platforms with some grass and hanging moss which can look pretty nice and i think that's a good list of items to add so i'll quickly jump through the drawing process and we can see what it looks like in the end the scene looks a lot livelier now and has more of that picturesque feeling we are going for to finish up let's highlight some shadows on the house which helps to create more contrast so that looks pretty good now another benefit of drawing a complete scene is that you're guaranteed to end up with a good screenshot to use on a steam page or anywhere else in architecture school one of the projects we had to complete in our first year was the pure nazi exercise which involved choosing one of the famous piranesi drawings of prisons and extending the drawing using our imagination trying to follow pure nazi's same style and design so for example i'll take this piranesi drawing here and i would have to continue this drawing until it fills up the rest of the screen normally we would draw this properly on a big sheet of paper but i'm just gonna quickly draw it with a mouse here just to give you a general idea we can start by simply extending the obvious lines and forms but eventually we'll get to the point where you'll have to start creating new objects and forms and we will have to rely on our creativity when we were in school it wasn't super clear what this assignment was for besides just an interesting art project but now i think it was an important design exercise in extrapolation it forces you to understand something at a small scale and recreate what you understood at a larger scale later down the road in architecture we would sometimes take a small object like an architectural detail or an ornament and be asked to design an entire building inspired by the small object you would have to identify the key features of the object determine what makes it unique and expand on the idea i think this is a powerful design tool and something that takes a lot of practice to get good at and you can apply this way of design thinking to just about anything you can even apply this same design technique to creating a video game let's say i take an everyday object like a water bottle and ask you to create a video game based on the water bottle as the main theme most people can probably come up with a game based on this premise but if you've had a lot of practice with this form of extrapolation you could come up with a pretty good and potentially commercially viable game just revolving around the idea of a water bottle so it's definitely a skill worth practicing if you are interested in doing any design work in terms of creating spaces for games i rediscovered this design method when i created the cozy fish market time lapse video in this video i had to make a full drawing within a limited amount of time so i could only focus my efforts on making this self-contained scene look as good as possible nothing else outside the frame mattered sometime after finishing this drawing i had to extend this drawing and redraw the rest of the docs area but this time by having this one fully complete scene as a reference i could follow the same design and drawing style to create the rest of the scene and the result just looked much better than the version before it if we directly compare the two drawings in the new version there's greater cohesion between all the different elements and the scene just looks much livelier because i focused on creating a standalone painting rather than individual assets and throwing them together jumping back to the original drawing i can begin extending out the rest of the scene based on the initial drawing now i'll just do a bit since it would be too much work to finish up the whole map but this initial scene becomes a solid base for establishing the spatial qualities that will appear in the rest of the map and whenever there's a point of interest where i think i will need to draw a lot of new assets at once i can create a second scene to make sure that that point of interest will also look very good now if you're starting to create a new game you probably don't want to jump into finalizing your art like this before you have a good direction with the development process and have a good idea of the full scope but eventually when you do need to start finalizing your art this method will bring a greater sense of cohesion between your art assets and result in a better looking game so i think this is a useful method of creating better looking scenes for 2d games for 3d scenes the process is a bit different because you can't just paint a finished scene you can instead create concept art to represent a 3d scene and this is one of the reasons why aaa games use concept art not just to get design ideas but to get an idea of how the game could potentially look on the player's screen if you get one piece that looks really attractive you can just remodel that same scene in 3d and set up the camera so that you get the exact same shot at that certain moment in the gameplay so again it becomes a powerful tool to develop a money shot and then extrapolate that shot to design the rest of the scene of course when designing 3d scenes you have to balance that with making sure the map as a whole works so you kind of need to jump back and forth between the overview and the player's viewpoint to get a good design the same technique is used in architectural design where in the design process architects have to develop the whole building in a coherent manner but also sketch scenes from a user's perspective to understand and improve user experience it doesn't matter how cool a building looks from a bird's eye view if the experience on the ground isn't good at the end of the day users don't have the vantage points of a designer and they experience spaces in limited ways so it's always important to design from the point of view of a user so that's about it i hope this video can be helpful with your future designs before i go i want to give a quick update about kickstarter we raised a total of 170 000 and we cannot thank you guys enough for the support the funding is a huge help for us to continue growing shaft rpg to one day be an amazing game and we will work our hardest to make it worth your weight one of the things that this money already helped us do is to hire another talented artist to rework the character animations which seems to be the biggest issue with the game so far we are pretty excited to show the new character designs and animations when they're ready in terms of the game's overall progress we've added a lot of art assets to the game over the past few months for the next two to three months i'm mainly going to focus on catching up with the coding and cleaning up the different parts of the game so that we can begin adding in more content our next goal is to have an alpha ready for this september which means the full game loop should be complete there's definitely a ton of work left to do to get to the alpha including finishing up a few more gameplay systems as well as implementing sound effects and music i think the biggest hurdle and most time-consuming portion of development coming up is implementing the npcs and giving them daily schedules and quests having unique npc behaviors and schedules is a huge part in making the game world more engaging and fun so it's a pretty important step to complete anyways that's it for now again we are super grateful for all your support and feedback on chef rpg and we have a lot of exciting things to show in the coming months thanks for watching and see you next time

Channel: Pixel Architect

Views: 799,662

Keywords: Level Design, Architecture, Gamedev, Indiegame, Pixel Art, Eastward, Stardew Valley, Tutorial

Id: qNACGP98b6c

Length: 11min 48sec (708 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 22 2022