Gadgetory

hey everyone this is Steve from gamers Nexus tonight we were at ECG C 2015 the East Coast game conference I'm joined by Jim Brown senior designer at Epic Games hello and we just came from Jim's talk about Unreal Tournament and the community and community involvement and I you brought up some interesting items that are involved in the development process so you showed heat maps right and can you explain what a heat map is and what it does for you right so we actually started data tracking on Gears of War was kind of the first time that we had done that internally and heat maps really just kind of show where people well you can use them in various different ways the example I used in that particular talk I had two up there which was one was showing where players move in a map so it's kind of a top-down look at the topography of the map and it just draws a little light essentially every time somebody steps someplace and so you can see like the path that they take as they move through the world and then it changes color based on how many people or how often that particular spot is visited the other thing that we use them for in Gears in particular was to show we just basically drop a marker whenever somebody died and so then we can go back and see how they died who killed them you know all that other type of information but in Gears in particular what we were looking for was we were trying to create a very specific type of gameplay that funneled people into kind of a central front in the map so that you can spawn and run in and always the combat was always going to maintain on the central fronts and by tracking player movement and player deaths we can see when that front fell apart and then try and figure out why and how to fix it if it wasn't happening and are there any particular elements in level design that you find players respond almost programmatically to is there if I see a set of stairs am I expected to respond a certain way yeah I mean there's any number of elements there's all these rules I mean I could spend forever talking about it it's just about how you group objects together or you know there's light in the doorway that's in a dark hallway it'll pull people there people's mentally respond different to ramps and they do the stairs for example and just whether some place looks accessible or not really influences how often they move there there's very very subtle things just in the architecture of a space or nooks and crannies where people can hide that kind of give these visual cues or even and have really dramatic outcomes to the way the game unfolds in Gears for example our camera was over behind you over your right shoulder and that led to a lot of problems looking around corners because you could swing the camera out around the right but you couldn't do that to the left so that really really influenced the way that we had to build a lot of our spaces because even just building a symmetrical space when you flip it around all the corners that you can look around from one side are now over balanced because the guys on the other side can't see that so it took a lot of work to work through those issues and then again you know in in in first-person like we're doing with Unreal Tournament you know how high the camera is your field of view all of that influences how the world feels when you're moving through it you have to have your scale correct not only in in terms of like how wide is the door but you know are there visual cues that kind of let the player know how large they are in comparison to the world around that I mean it's like it's really kind of cascading things so there's any number of ways that you could you could tackle that so it sounds like level design as much as it is designed is also partly a science it absolutely is and because that's one of the reasons we really started doing a lot of the data tracking that we did and really trying to look at it more from not just a pure design perspective a lot of design is actually about human-computer interaction and understanding how people react how people interpret and human behavior just in general and there's a lot of elements that play into that that are more complicated than just making a fun gameplay space very cool so for more information of course Unreal Tournament is actively in development can you can you direct people where to go for that sure Unreal Tournament comm it's really easy from there you can download the game you can join our forums you can get involved in the process we're doing this whole new thing that's completely open community development so anybody can get involved just by playing just by reading just by participating or they can dive in full bore and start modeling and programming and designing and doing all the things we want to leverage the power of everyone to really make this the best game that we possibly can so Unreal Tournament comm for more information on that of course gamers Nexus tonight for the full article and we will see you all next time you