We recently realized that there are many unspoken understandings we and our colleagues share; expectations and assumptions taken for granted as part of our process. We've struggled to explain ourselves in detail for new artists and designers who had joined our team. This talk was a way for us to explore and articulate this accumulated knowledge.
To understand our approach, it’s useful to know where we’re coming from as developers, and where Bethesda Game Studios is coming from as a whole.
While the pipe kit is a good example of a simple art kit, our primary topic here is architectural kit creation. Examples of architectural kits would include the Nord Crypts in Skyrim, or the Vaults from Fallout 3. This is important to topic for gameplay, because kits are the primary building blocks of level design at Bethesda Game Studios.
Kits aren't a new idea. They aren’t unique to Bethesda or to the types of games we make. Consider the board game Carcassone. Unlike Monopoly or Scrabble, the board changes every time you play Carcassone. The tiles are arranged so that roads meet roads, rivers meet rivers, and so on, creating an effectively randomized yet visually cohesive whole. It’s easy to see the grid when looking at a Carcassone table, and how this system of art works together to make a unique play field. The board tiles are themselves an excellent example of an environmental art kit.
Back in November of 2002, Lee Perry (then of Epic, now BitMonster) authored an article in Game Developer magazine which explored a modular approach to level design and world building, specifically as a way to help cope with the increased fidelity of games at that time.
Bethesda has been at this for quite some time - 18 year as of this writing. Terminator: Future Shock and the Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall, both games which far pre-date our (Nate and Joel's) tenure at the studio, embraced a modular approach to world-building, which would become the foundation upon which much of our current thinking and technology are built.
Something else to try is stacking kits on top of each other. In this example we've placed to hallways right on top of each other. Nate spoke earlier about footprint bounds, and it applies vertically as well as horizontally. This kit uses the entire vertical footprint, creating a co-planar ceiling/floor. This is problematic for a number of reasons: The lack of thickness will be a visual issue if you can ever see it, say from a stairwell or if there’s a hole. It can also cause z-fighting flicker, make optimization and trigger placement very difficult, and generally create a confusing editor view for you.
This is a system where we build all of the standard kit pieces in the traditional way, but then layer in freely placed walls, pillars and balconies to break up the play space in an organic way. The diagram below shows a simple example where shell pieces are used to establish a room, and free walls and pillars are used to quickly create a more organic shape than the corner allowed by the strictly grid-snapped shell.
Because while I don’t believe our team could have built Skyrim any other way, I also believe that no other team could have made Skyrim. Other teams could have made a game like Skyrim, and perhaps have spent more time or money, or worked with more people, or embraced different ideologies. But any of those games would have been a different one than what we created, and we're proud of the games we've made.
Terrific article, Joel and Nate! Really looking forward to watching the whole thing when it goes up in the GDC Vault.
This is something I hadn't seen before. Can you go into more detail on it, how you've used it, and how it helps?
We've started using helper markers in a few different ways. In the test image shown above, for example, the walls and doorways are outlined with marker geometry, giving the LD a clear representation of the level layout, even in top-down or cluttered views. Also in that example are ceiling "handle" squares which make it easy to grab one-sided art without needing to flip the camera to select it.
There are some other ways of using them we've found, too. For example, we can show which direction a door will open, differentiate asymmetrical sides of a hall, or indicate the direction of flow on pieces that have to tile in a specific direction relative to each other. They're great for making the non-obvious obvious at-a-glance.
Markers are an old concept, by the way. We've used them for years on things such as animation markers and furniture. But some of our kit-specific applications are simply new ideas, and an example of it's useful to be continually questioning and improving your workflow.
Tremendously generous post to all other working artists and level designers out there that want to work smarter and get more content done without killing themselves. Can't thank you enough.
Epic article guys! Impressed by consistency all the way through!
As a student of game and level design, this information was invaluable to me. I really can't thank you guys enough for posting this.
Thanks for one absolutely fantastic article! Your shared knowledge is invaluable.
Wonderful article... but I think the grid-based approach is fundamentally flawed when it comes to art fatigue. It makes all the proportions in the world identical.. every hallway, every door, every ledge, every street and every alley.
Oblivion, Fallout 3, Skyrim... these never felt like real worlds to me. It seems like the work of a particularly unimaginative dungeon master trying to support a script that deserves more.
What a wonderfully we'll written article. I am surprised at the amount of in-depth, complicated work involved in making things simple to design.
Great, huge blog! But believe me, I IMMEDIATELY noticed how little variation there was in Skyrim, it often didn't feel much better than Oblivion.
Better tools would help immeasurably. I played around with the Skyrim editor about a year ago, and it felt vastly outdated compared too Cryengine 3 and Unity (which I've played with, wouldn't doubt UE4 is the same way). Instant play and edit, being able to cover up seems by just painting textures onto things in the editor.
The biggest help I could see to your kind of game are tint maps, so you can just change the color of whatever asset you want instantly, and the aforementioned in editor texture painting, along with decals, hopefully both linked to tessellation and displacement maps so the geometry itself changes. You could probably get a lot more mileage out of stuff with such tools, but even then I'd say you'd probably need to double you artist count for interiors at least. Coming to the same exact village again and again and again made parts of Skyrim get really boring really quick.
This is an AWESOME article in terms of explaining workflow! I wish so many studios did this too, it's a lot we can learn from as a really small studio!
Square meshes and 'cubic' tile-blocks on naturalistic indoor environments (eg natural caves) can be a challenge - how about equilateral triangular meshes, or for 3d space rhombic-dodecahedrons?
It might be a pain at first for the technical crew - as their graphics and physics tools are probably based around square and cuboid bounding shapes - but maybe the rewards are there?
Well over 300+ hours of pure enjoy on Oblivion by the way - so many thanks, to you and all the Bethesda team.
.. Meant to say 'elongated dodecahedron' not 'truncated octahedron' .. but you knew that anyway..
Very interesting read, By far the biggest improvement I have to say going from TES IV to V is the dungeon diversity, really made my 300+ hours much more enjoyable.
I hope some day we have a solution to make things really diverse in terms of art assets, but you can't at the moment it seems, I know ID tried something with Rage and their Megatextures to make it not so much repeating assets, but honestly I can't say I was really struck by that when I played it.
Did you guys try using such systems for your open world areas? If so, how did that work out?
I'm clocked at 1,131 hours. PC Mods are the saving grace.
Fantastic post, it's really great to get an insight into the development process behind the kits. Some of the cave kit design was really stunning in particular - I've never seen organic forms done in a kit that well before.
I'm really curious to see where you're going forward from this though. On our current project, we use tiled assets that are then deformed along a curve to get a more organic flow and contour to natural areas, such as cliffs and coastlines - and occasional careful use of world-space mapping to both help the tiling and to alleviate artefacts from deformation.
This has led me to wonder whether other types of more procedural (but cheap) deformation wouldn't find use in kit-based systems as well - perhaps something like using blendshapes to create a range of variations on a single tile.
Is this a direction you've explored at all?
I didn't know anyone from Skyrim was brave enough to put out articles where commenters could get at them, but just let me say you did an amazing job and the one unique thing about each dungeon means it still feels totally fresh to me after 200 hours.
I would also love to hear about the process involved in creating the landmass of Skyrim.. how the decisions came through from identifying segregated areas, combining/unifying them, and massaging it to it's final epic form. I also wonder how artists and designers were assigned and what tasks they needed to take as I imagine the overlap/transition from one area to another could be quite a thing to handle.
Great game btw, 300+ hours and counting. Best wishes for Bethesda's next endeavors!
Good thing Skyrims naming conventions are simpler than Fallout 3s eh!
What a read! I notice you'd written at various points that you could go into more detail, but really this is so much more detail than I expected to find and it was absolutely fascinating, thanks for writing it up!
Great post, thank you for sharing insight into one of the impressive game studios out there.
I'm curious to hear why things like pipes or caves aren't generated or altered procedurally. The screenshot with the pipes in particular looks like obvious kit-use that makes little logical sense in the world, and where you can see the grid right away.
With techniques like triplanar texturing and some simple procedural rules, you could make true "kits".
What is preventing games from adopting this? Do artists hate using it? Do programmers hate creating it? Does it require dev/design hybrid unicorns that teams don't have enough of? If you did a post on this, I imagine a lot of people would be interested.
- Signed, someone who has done a lot of demoscene-style work and doesn't quite get why Quake 3 Arena was the last time they saw a truly curved surface in a game.
Excellent article. This information will be of great use to me in the future!
I'd be interested in hearing about applications of some other techniques of modular level design, like procedural generation with parameters. I could see it being particularly helpful in organic assets like trees and the likes.
Then again, that'd require quite a bit of collaboration between some sort of programmer and artists.
Lucien - there's quite a lot of interest and thinking out there about procedural generation today, and the techniques we use certainly share some common ground. Our technique isn't procedural at all, however. The kits are designed to empower us to hand-create spaces. Our objectives are very similar to those you'd have when thinking about a procedural system.
This article will help me to create better sceneries. I use 3d Studio Max to create the 3d files. I love working with grid and modular pieces. The use of Modular method helps a lot because allows to make games with infinite possibilities. I use "Blitz3D" for my projects (open world adventure game) because i want to show to the companies what I can do as a programmer or designer in a pure way. Anyway I'm learning the creation kit and i have to say that the editor is awesome!
I know you worked hard on this and had to use this system in order to finish the level design, and respect to all that but i have to say this: all i remember about skyrim dungeons is that they were very boring and repetitive.. after the first gameplay i just couldnt do it anymore, i knew everytime i would enter a dungeon/cave/etc i would see the exact same repeated walls, details, over and over, and over, the same useless items, even the same 3 year old puzzles.. which is weird cause in fallout 3 the world felt more complex and original. all im trying to say is that this modular system that you love and are so passionate about, FAILED , and to me, it just seems that you could just put more effort into creating more original fun content, and hire more level designers, instead of reusing the same pieces so much.. i mean bethesda got 500 million for skyrim or something like that, im sure you can do better than 10 people. Also i do believe a modular system is helpful especialy when designing big worlds, but i also know that modular = more boring, more dull, more lazyness, and that there has to be a balance. you can hate me, disregard this , i dont care, but i know im right on this one.
Thanks for the feedback, Andy.
For anyone following this post who would be interested, slides and video for our 2016 "sequel" talk have gone up on the GDC Vault. I'll also post slides and a transcript here when I can.