The Garden

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From the course by California Institute of the Arts

World Design for Video Games

461 оценки

California Institute of the Arts

World Design for Video Games

461 оценки

Course 3 of 5 in the Specialization Game Design: Art and Concepts

Start creating your world. A game world is not just a backdrop for your game—be it minimal or detailed, contained or part of a much bigger universe, it provides the context for your player. Ultimately, a game world should feel alive and wholly unique to any player who will experience it. In this course, we will explore game worlds in existing games and study the art and influences that inform their themes and styles. We will also investigate key components of environment and level design as well as strategies designers use to define gameplay or advance it. We’ll also look at navigation and the elements that make your world as real (or unreal) as you want it to be. A weekly challenge will prompt you to explore styles and inspirations for possible game worlds, and you’ll learn effective ways to communicate your ideas from concepts to presentation-worthy proofs of concept.

From the lesson

The Way You Move

How do you move in a video game world? This week we’ll discuss fundamental components and concepts in world and level design. Naturally, these evolve as the gameplay progresses but there are specific strategies you can use to create the finer details in a game environment. At the end of the week, you are challenged to take the previous week’s visual research exercise and expand upon it, giving it shape and volume.

Visualizing the game world2:49

Level Design2:17

Bordering the World1:40

Navigation and Time1:28

Meet the Instructors

Théotime Vaillant
Instructor, Experimental Animation
School of Film/Video

Here in this video, I want to to talk about the garden.

Why the garden?

Think about a garden and how it's made, how it's constructed,

and how it's engineered.

It's engineered for leisure.

It's engineered to walk in.

A lot of contraptions in gardens like mazes are exactly

what you can find in video games, even though you might not recognize them.

Now what I want to do is talk a little bit about two different types of gardens.

The French gardens.

The French gardens are altered, the paths are not grass.

They are clearly labeled and defined.

They are color coded and you don't need any arrows.

You know exactly where you are going.

It doesn't mean that you can't have multiple infringements,

that you can't which path to take.

But, you will have avenues clearly bordered by trees.

You will have hay and gravel on the floor.

You will have a sense of really ordered spaces.

And then you have English gardens.

English gardens became really popular with this simple idea.

How to bring the wild into a garden, into a space where you can go to leisure.

In English gardens, you have this

feeling of being in a world that is much bigger than what it is.

And as you walk into an English garden,

you might see more nature than contraption.

In the end, all of this is also design and perfectly ordered.

It's just ordered the way nature for the time was understood.

And that's exactly what you do in video games,

when you create games which are seemingly lush, detailed environment.

You look at nature and you try to emulate and

bring all these aspects into your game, into this world.

So that when your player will walk into these trees and these forest, and

these field

and even cities,

it will have the feeling of being into an actual space.

A space that is not just defined through rules and mathematic, and algorithms.

But space that is wild, and just left to nature.

Obviously, all of that is geometry, algorithm, and mathematic,

but thinking about how to emulate an aspect that is seemingly uncontrollable and

free is what will make your game more interesting.

Here, I want to talk about the Ha-ha.

What is the Ha-ha?

Well the ha-ha is one of my favorite ideas ever in video games and gardening.

The Ha-ha is a trench.

A trench is going to act as a divider in your garden between spaces.

It's going to border the world or the garden without having to put any fence,

an invisible barrier and destroy the view.

The way it works is if you stand in the middle of the garden and

see what's all over, you will see all the gardens, all the field.

The view is not going to be interrupted by any kind of wall.

But then as you get closer to it and bump into that trench, that ha-ha, and that's

what you all exclaim yourself, then you get at the end of the world, basically.

It just defines what is going to be this playable area.

What is going to be this garden, this playground.

It doesn't mean that the playground from the view can expand out of its boundaries.

But the playground itself is contained in the limit of the ha-ha.

The limit of the trench.

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