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00:30Emotionally, that gets you a lot more into the game. You feel like you're there, you're with your men, you're
00:35giving the orders directly to them from the battlefield perspective.
00:38So you need to work on with your line of sight, with what you see and what you can give
00:42in your own point of view. And so the level design used that new camera type in NRTS.
00:48The difference on the level design side is that every building, every tree, every hill now becomes an actual block
00:55to the line of sight of the game.
00:58In other games that I've worked on, we had the Fog of War or Shroud or whatever you wanted to
01:03call it, that was just kind of this gray mass that hid things out there.
01:07But we don't have that in our game, but we don't need it because every building that's out there, you
01:12can't see what's beyond it unless you actually go around and look at it.
01:15Any hill that's there, it blocks the line of sight behind. And so all of those aspects that in other
01:20games you just see beyond, they don't really matter to the player, are now an integral part of the level
01:26design and what the player has to interact with.
01:28Games I've worked on, hill was mostly decoration. It was something there because either the level designer or the artist
01:35thought that it would look good in its location.
01:36A good example of that is the artillery. You can hide the artillery like behind a building or behind a
01:43hill or whatever, and your enemy won't be able to see it from his point of view because he's too
01:49low.
01:49So he won't have this bird's eye where you're going to be able to see the artillery and then just
01:53bring a helicopter to it.
01:55He will need to look at the sky, look at the tracer coming from the artillery, then need to manage
02:01to go there with his whatever, his transport or whatever,
02:05and then find out where the artillery is.
02:07For our game, that hill actually is a gameplay feature. It blocks your line of sight. People can hide behind
02:12it. You can set up ambushes behind it.
02:14If you get to the top, suddenly you've got a much larger range of view because you can see over
02:18everything else out there in the terrain.
02:20So it really becomes an actual strategic location to own within the game.
02:24All of our game is based on gameplay. Even for the level design, the game design, the storyline, everything goes
02:31toward gameplay.
02:32There's almost nothing on the map that doesn't affect gameplay, either by blocking line of sight or by blocking pathfinding
02:40or something.
02:42So that tree there in that position is something that has to be thought through and designed.
02:48Whether or not the bush is so big that your infantry can't see over it or can't shoot over it
02:53is an important decision
02:54because it changes how you're going to use your units in that position.
02:58And so all of those little things that if you just kind of looked at the picture of the map
03:01or went in
03:02and were wandering around looking at the map, that you think, oh, that's just decoration.
03:06Most of that actually is gameplay and has to be designed as much as, you know, everything else in the
03:12whole map.
03:12That's it.
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