00:00...sovereinti, from the ashes of New York
00:03to the loneliest, most barren corner of Damnation
00:06nothing remains, nothing
00:09I'm Jacob Minkoff, lead game designer at Blue Omega Entertainment
00:12and I'm going to tell you a little bit about the unique way we design the levels for Damnation
00:22In Damnation we have these levels that are absolutely massive
00:26have huge vertical height and are much more organic and multi-layered
00:29than levels you would typically see in a shooter
00:33Traditionally, level design is often done on graph paper
00:36you simply do top-down views of the player path through it
00:39but in Damnation we couldn't really do that
00:42because the overall feeling of being a huge realistic space
00:46was so important to us that we actually started out with the concept art
00:51When we started the development of Damnation
00:53we didn't realize just how much verticality was going to be needed
00:57In the example of our first design for Boomtown
01:01it was a very small area
01:03We thought that, you know, six stories would be huge
01:06The next version was much more compact
01:09Maybe there were buildings that were ten stories in it now
01:11And the final design for Boomtown is a massive canyon
01:15And the steam generator itself is about 40 or 50 stories tall
01:21And it now takes the player a good 30 minutes to climb from the base of the steam engine to
01:29the top
01:29So once we finally got this vision from the concept artist that we said, yes, that is Boomtown
01:35It was this pencil sketch
01:36And we went ahead and we drew on top of it
01:40So the level designers would look at that image
01:43and they would circle different locations and say, oh, it would be really cool
01:47if the player went from here to here to here
01:50In the case of the mines in Boomtown
01:54The mines were designed as this huge cavern with a spire going up the center of it
02:01And all sorts of different buildings built into the cavern walls along the side of the mines
02:07The level designers went ahead and drew paths on top of it
02:11And they said, okay, well, there are all these cool elements in this image
02:16Let's look at that and say, it would be really cool if the player had to climb into this building
02:22And had to get onto the rooftop
02:23It would be really interesting if they had to cross over this canyon a few different times
02:28And we'd put the gameplay into the image
02:31I think that we really succeeded in our goal of bringing these epic artistic visuals
02:38To a much more mainstream shooter
02:52Be sure to check it out on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC
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