RPG Design: Somebody Call the Dungeon Architect!
You know, it was a lot easier back in the 80's when I was just making dungeons with pencil and graph paper.

Back in '88 or so, I was at a science fiction and fantasy symposium with Tracy Hickman, co-author of the Dragonlance novels (among many others), as well as the famed Ravenloft module for Dungeons & Dragons. He gave a few talks both on writing and publishing, and on role-playing games. Though he's nowhere close to being my favorite author, his comments were very valuable and enlightening.

Among his many topics, he talked about creating maps for the players. He said, "Have you ever tried to actually to envision or model one of the maps from the earlier modules in 3D? Like any of the castles? If you do, one thing you'll discover very quickly is that they are dumpy! Very squat and flat. That's not very realistic."

Apparently, that was part of his goal with Ravenloft, which includes a very tall castle with a lot of use of vertical space. "If you want to confuse your players," he explained, "give them a lot of vertical movement. They'll inevitably get mapping errors, and become convinced that they've run into some kind of teleport trap because nothing is lining up right."

That's mainly because the maps were done on plain ol' graph paper, encouraging a very flat, top-down design. In fact, the use of vertical movement was such a special case that in the early editions of dice & paper Dungeons & Dragons, difficulty (and treasure) was based almost entirely on how many stairs you had descended - your "dungeon level."

The CRPGs I fell in love with in the early days of the hobby often used a player-eye (or mouse-eye?) perspective of dungeon maps in sort of a fake 3D view. Not too unlike the perspective indie RPG Cute Knight Deluxe offers. But again, the dungeons were flat maps in 2D space. Stairways, ladders, pits, and so forth were simply objects that appeared that took you to different levels. The encounters generally became a little harder with each level you descended. Just like old-school D&D. Even the Ultima series, with it's top-down perspective through much of the world, used the mouse-eye view of the flat dungeon levels (of which, if I recall correctly, there were exactly 8 for each dungeon in Ultima III and IV).

Now we move to the modern era, where it almost as easy to render a dungeon in "true" 3D as it is to render those old 2D mouse-eye views. In fact, indie RPG Devil Whiskey limits movement and view to the four cardinal directions as these old-school games (it is heavily inspired by the original Bard's Tale games), but renders the view in true 3D. Ditto for the now-defunct Dungeon Maker engine. That's certainly an option. And there are some nifty things you can do with modern 3D rendering that faking it in the 2D world couldn't offer to make the world look better, including escaping the old 10' x 10' block and 90-degree turn restrictions of the older games.

But when you can really take advantage of the vertical element with 3D views and realistic architecture (and lighting, bump-mapping, or whatever else sounds good), it kinda feels like a waste to wander around a "dumpy", mostly flat world. Things that looked cool on graph paper may not translate to excitement on the game's screen.

Old-school RPG editors (Bard's Tale Construction Set, Forgotten Realms Unlimited Adventures, etc.) were pretty close to what you see with Dungeon Crafter. Fill in the floors, set the doors and walls, and away you go. Yeah, you didn't have many choices to deal with, but it was fast. But good luck figuring out a way to make these maps interesting. There's only so much you can do with flat levels of 10' x 10' squares.

So now we have all kinds of power to make virtually anything we can imagine within the constraints of the engine and the target computer's ability to render your ideas in real-time. But with this flexibility comes vastly increased complexity - by an exponential factor. Sure, you can impose some constraints on your design to speed creation time - I've got some "tiles" under construction right now which I'm going to be using to speed development of some areas. But disposing of the old, simple graph-paper grid can make things like just making sure floors and walls line up properly kinda tricky. Because, of course, sometimes you may not want them to line up. With all those options means lots of choices, and more complicated tools to accomodate those choices.

One issue I've run into in the development of Frayed Knights is lighting. Really cool lighting covers a multitude of sins, I've learned. But, with the engine I'm using, lighting can be really nice and really cheap, but it's also pretty finicky thing. The human brain relies heavily upon light, and so realistic lighting gives us all kinds of signals that help us make-believe that a picture on little flat-screen monitor is actually a window into another world. But squirrely lighting jars us out of that illusion just as easily, and causes frustration because things don't behave the way they look like they should. And then of course, there are problems with a level being too dark, too bright and washed out, or... both, as in the picture to the right. (That's all stand-in texturing, I should note... as are all the Frayed Knights pictures in this post. We're trying to crank along on geometry right now.)

Finding and fixing lighting bugs can also be a major chore. Texturing is another one. I'm not even gonna go there - entire books have been devoted to that subject.

Yet another challenge is more basic - how do you make a good 3D gaming environment? One book I own, "Beginning Game Level Design," suggests picking up some textbooks on architecture. Knowledge of architecture, set design, interior decoration, and 2D art composition skills are just as important here as game design, creativity, and technical competency with tools. In many ways, the design task is closer to that of a theatrical or cinematic set designer, as the builder not only has to satisfy the demands of style and function for the fictional creators of the environment, but also satisfy the aesthetics of the game and the demands of the mechanics.

Additionally, those really cool, visually appealing environments can play hell with the AI pathfinding and successful player navigation.

Regardless of technology, for the kind of RPG I'm interested in (and interested in making), these environments need to satisfy several requirements:

#1 - Exploration is a big deal in RPGs, so a good "level" should provide an interesting environment to explore. It should provide hints for interesting things to come. A good dungeon level should promise hidden secrets, give you glimpses of currently unattainable goals, and something new and different as you progress.

#2 - Since combat provides the meat of most RPG gameplay, the environment should provide some interesting tactical challenges - if that is a feature of the game.

#3 - A dungeon level should provide some interesting spatial/navigational puzzles. This is more appropriate for 3D environments with restricted vertical movement, but even the old dice-and-paper games had things like notorious chessboard floors and similar puzzles or "tricks" involving navigating the environment.

#4 - A good dungeon level should be visually appealing. Easier said than done, sometimes. This comes from a combination of interesting geometry, good texturing, and lighting. It should at least look plausible given the constraints of the world. Huge, flat ceilings without arches or supports look wrong. Stark transitions between material types can look bad. Bad color combinations look bad. Too much repetition of texture looks bad. Too much contrast looks bad. Too little contrast looks bad. There are probably a zillion other things that detract from the looks of things, and I won't even recognize them when I see them.

There may be a lot more science to it than I understand. There is a lot to it. So much, that it gets a little intimidating for a guy like me, for whom the term "programmer art" is something of a compliment. Nevertheless, there's something incredibly satisfying about learning to go from the old graph paper maps of my childhood to making 3D dungeons in my... um, later childhood.

(Images come from Frayed Knights, Might & Magic 1, and Wishbone's Dungeon Maker alpha version)

Labels: Frayed Knights, game art, Game Design, Roleplaying Games

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