Level Design Thoughts 4-11-23

We're in what should be the last month of Inhuman's development and the focus lately has been getting each major arena feeling distinct and polished. In doing so I've had to grapple with old mistakes that were getting in the way of letting the game's combat be the best it can be. 

Adding verticality is a great way to add some visual depth to a scene, but it's also an easy way to make it harder for the player and enemy characters to effectively move around. It also gets in the way of allowing the space to look functional. Especially in indoor environments, we tend to keep our floors fairly flat in real life for maximum accessibility. You can see an example of an old arena with these problems here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHANXEju4gA 

In this space I'd say the arena suffers from an arbitrary change in height, basically added vertical space that doesn't seem to have any functional purpose. It's a change in height for the sake of a change in height, making it awkward for enemies to get around. Enemy movement is basically pinched at two points, with either path they can take meeting at a fairly restrictive middle part of the arena. Each stairway also represents a point we want them to avoid hanging around, lest they basically block the way for other squadmates to move around.

When I added the Charger as a sorta climax/boss encounter for the fight, these issues became even more apparent. The charger's a bit on the slow side, and the restrictive pathways often had him taking far too long to get back in the player's line of sight. This needed addressing!

By removing the needless change in height I naturally opened up the floor to them, making it a good deal easier for them to reposition themselves. I did keep a little raised up area, but in the back to allow for a clear vantage point for an officer who spawns there. Since it's in the back of the arena, it adds an extra little layer rather than getting in the way of the main combat space, so I'd call that a win.

Another core issue the game's suffered from for a while is having incredibly vague industrial spaces making up the majority of the game. With our art team getting a lot done in the last year we've managed to start addressing this while increasing our visual fidelity, but this has had its downsides as we're basically going through and either reworking content or cutting it if we can't find an elegant way to make it look like a functional space.

Scope creep is an incredibly common problem in game development, but trying to effectively plan ahead can do a lot to mitigate it. Earlier in the project I should have set a more realistic bar for our visuals and then worked around that within Half-Life 2's asset library. If you're doing a hobby project, definitely consider what assets you're working with, because if you start adding stuff it will often make your older work effectively outdated.

Overall though it's hard to feel too bad. The level of visual quality we're achieving is certainly helping to set the mod apart from others. I've been hesitant to show off a lot of that on this Patreon due to a lot of it not being directly my work, but here's an arena I've been working on you might recognize from the trailer. 

So once again this spot has an arbitrary change in height and when you remove the clutter that makes up the majority of cover, you realize it's a kinda nonsensical empty space. The lack of identity was really killing me, so I decided to take some inspiration from a boiler room in Half-Life Alyx. Rather than trying to seriously rework the center, I expanded the outer edges and let the detail there help define the space. 

This also coincided with a change in identity to the fight itself, going from a standard soldier encounter to a layered engagement involving the charger coming in about halfway through the fight. The Charger's a serious pressure enemy, so having an arena with naturally looping paths and lots of ways for the player to retreat was a must. 

You can see this arena in action here:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/another-revamped-81383554 

Next up I'll be going over some AI thoughts as I finishing polishing up the Suppressor and Charger, so look forward to that and a bit more behind the scenes content before the game is done.