How to create balanced Multiplayer Levels without mirroring everything. One of the most important parts of every competitive multiplayer game is the right balancing. Countless hours are poured into making sure that no player has an unfair advantage. This becomes much harder if you talk about an RTS with several factions made up of countless units, instead of singular characters or classes. If those RTS factions also happen to be asymmetric themselves, with, among other things, different damage and range values for even the most basic units, things get even more complicated.And that’s just the characters and units. Often forgotten in these discussions are the levels themselves that have to be balanced as well. And while this does work very well, and there are countless games I could list here that follow this approach, it just comes with one major weakness: Those perfectly mirrored maps? They are perfectly mirrored. So much so that they often feel obviously artificial and, for the lack of a better term, “gamey”. This can be somewhat hidden with a good art direction, and, if your game places less of an emphasis on immersion or environmental narrative, even ignored in favour of competitive maps. But with Iron Harvest, a real-time strategy game set in an alternate Europe of the 1920s, we had the added problem that we very much wanted our maps to feel like real places with real purposes. This had been one of our guiding principles long before we really started getting into creating maps for the Multiplayer Mode of our game, and already shaped several maps of our campaign: Everything needed to have a purpose. From a gameplay perspective, but from a narrative one as well, every building needed to have a reason to exist in the way and form it existed in; every part of cover needed to have some explanation for its position behind it. While quite arduous, this process helped give our maps an incredible atmosphere and it would have felt weird to abandon and ignore it for our multiplayer maps completely. To add in another complication, we realized during some early tests that the mirroring of levels can be surprisingly difficult if your tools and your engine are not specifically set up for this. And while entirely asymmetrical maps were technically an option, we did not consider ourselves up for such a challenge this early on in the project, especially since most of us did have little to no experience in this specific kind of multiplayer map design. So here is how we managed to create balanced and fair multiplayer maps without them feeling artificial and being to obviously mirrored. Picking apart the Past In the end, we found our answer while studying the original Company of Heroes. Similar to Iron Harvest, Company of Heroes has a setting very close to reality, and as a result, very few of its maps are perfectly symmetrical. It also is still beloved among fans even today and has a very passionate map-making and modding scene. We spent considerable time studying those communities, both to collect data about their preferred maps and annoyances but also to look at their tools and guides for map-making. We also experimented with the official Editor for Company of Heroes, which in turn allowed us to study its maps in much greater detail without the restrictions or distractions of live gameplay. And this is also how we found out how they solved our current problem in an equally simple yet brilliant manner: The maps were still mirrored and symmetrical. Except that this symmetry was restricted to elements with a clear gameplay purpose only. Most other elements were placed much more loosely. Additionally, they used different versions of gameplay elements that looked wildly different from each other but were identical in function at opposing locations. As a final touch, they did not measure their symmetry with a ruler, mirrored elements as it turns out, were often not perfectly mirrored after all, with a meter or two and some degrees of a discrepancy between both objects being the norm. Proof that this worked was the simple fact that we hadn’t been able to see this without the use of the editor tools. Looking at maps just from a zoomed in gameplay perspective or a small stylized minimap full of icons this simple fact was never apparent. Only after we started using the Editor and gained the ability to zoom out and look at these maps as a whole, we started seeing the patterns. Asymmetric Factions Parts 2 and 3 of this article as well as further “Making of Iron Harvest” articles will follow soon! Magnus Brauckhoff Magnus wanted to learn how to create games from a young age. After finally finishing his Bachelor’s Degree in Game Design in 2017, he moved to Bremen and started working as a Level Designer on Iron Harvest at KING Art Games. Having released the first big game he was part of, he is already eager to see what comes next. The post Making of Iron Harvest: Perfect Asymmetry in Level Design (Part 1/3) appeared first on Making Games. Making of Iron Harvest: Perfect Asymmetry in Level Design (Part 1/3) published first on https://spymugblog.tumblr.com/ Making of Iron Harvest: Perfect Asymmetry in Level Design (Part 1/3) published first on https://waltergillespie.tumblr.com/ via Tumblr Making of Iron Harvest: Perfect Asymmetry in Level Design (Part 1/3)
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
About MeI work as a Freelancer in Texas, I develop software's and website's. I have good skill-set in programming and I am a blogger too, I have my own website in which I post my blogs, basic steps to developing software's and tips on debugging the issues. Visit my website to learn the easiest way of debugging issues in your software or computer. |