Making Believable Game Environments

A Deep Dive by Erica Mitton

Abstract

An important aspect of environment design is being able to create realistic environments that feel real and can tell a story to the player. Environment design is something I am very intrigued by so I decided to do a deep dive on making believable game environments. It is important as an environment designer to be able to make environments feel human as it can assist greatly in telling a story to the player and make them feel emotions that pertain to the game overall. The objective of this deep dive is to research methods used by designers from all levels to create human feeling environments that help convey the game’s story. The main topics that will be explored during this deep dive are methods used to make game environments, drawing from architecture and interior design, telling narrative through the environment, and how to make an area feel real and human.

Introduction

Environment design is an important aspect of game design that aids in immersing the player and telling a story. However, to really make use of an environment’s ability to subtly convey narrative and theme is to make them feel real and believable. An important aspect when designing environments for games is to make sure the environment is immersive and rich. A strategy to do this is to make environments that feel real is important in telling a story subtly and giving a human touch to the game world. This deep dive will assist environment designers in using methods to make game environments that feel human and believable. The basics of environment design have been well researched and practiced, drawing from architecture and interior design. It is well known how to make a good environment, but what this deep dive will focus on is making these environments feel real and human. This deep dive will look into new topics and methods using the foundation of environment design to show how to make believable environments.

Background

The sources relevant to this topic were mainly methods directly found from industry professionals. These sources are reliable to further this deep dive as these environment designers have industry experience and have good knowledge on environment design and how to make these environments feel real. These sources were analyzed for their reliability and relevance to the deep dive topic. They contain direct testimony from industry professionals and the methods they use in their designs.

These sources were reviewed and analyzed for this deep dive to understand the value each of them bring to this research. All sources bring their own perspective on the topic of making believable environments and the workflow both beginners and professionals go through to create and design environments. These sources will overall aid with the deep dive and understanding of creating human and real environments for games whether the reader is a beginner just starting out or a seasoned designer!

Objective

I want to research making environments that feel real to help convey narrative subtly. This skill will be important to environment designers, both experienced and just starting out. By adding aspects of narrative design and level design, an environment can be made rich and also have a purpose in the player’s journey through the game.

1. I think that making believable environments is important to make them feel less static and help convey narrative elements. Being able to make environments feel real is an important skill for environment designers and modelers in order to make the area believable to the players.

2. Research on this topic will help advance my skills in designing and creating environments by learning how to add human touches and believability to an environment. This will also help other environment designers learn how to make their environments less static and more real and interactive to the player.

Results

From reading many research articles and first hand experiences, I gathered methods from industry professionals. I pulled from quite a few different sources to get as many different perspectives as I could and to review as many different methods as possible. For example, I looked into an article written by Laurie Durand who worked on For Honor to understand her process when designing environments. I also looked at an anecdote by Kazuya Tachibana who, like me, is a beginner in environmental design to understand their approach as a new designer. Reading these articles helped me to look at two different processes and methods when it comes to designing environments from both a professional and a beginner.

There are also a few games that I looked at that do environmental design really well to see how they created realistic and believable environments. One game I particularly found useful and interesting is Last of Us. Since it is an apocalyptic game, there is tons of opportunity for storytelling through the environment and creating environments that feel like they have been affected by humans and events.

Last of Us, 2013

An example of creating believable environments and telling a story is the above screen grab from Last of Us. There is an abandoned highway with cars that have been left scattered about. The player can try and imagine the stories of the people who left their cars by observing the meticulously placed objects (Straley 2013). Another game that does this well is Alien the Game. A bloodstain on the floor could pertain to something bad happening there although the player cannot do anything with the blood but observe it.The only use it has is telling the player that someone possibly died there and there is danger on the ship. (McRae 2017).

For some extra methods and advice, I viewed a couple videos from Youtube, TED Talks, and GDC Talks. These gave me a good general and easy to understand overview of different methods used in environment design to create believable environments.

Method

After reviewing multiple sources, there were quite a few references I found to be helpful in gathering information on this topic. One of the main methods I gathered from reading multiple articles came from a source written by CG Master Academy. There are some really great sources on this website but the one I reviewed talked about the main method used to make an immersive environment by eliciting emotion through the design. It can be done through five main tools such as color, scope of space, weather, light and shadow, and inversion. The methods used in this article are discussed thoroughly and give multiple games as examples to further explain how to use these tools (CGMA 2022). For example, in terms of use of color, the article talks about how Resident Evil uses monochrome color palettes, gives context for the time period and influences the player’s emotion by creating suspension (CGMA 2022).

Resident Evil Biohazard, 2017

Another method I found interesting came from the article written by Laura Durand about her work on For Honor. She goes into detail about how to use architectural knowledge when designing to create accurate buildings and decorations in a space in order to make it feel believable (Durand 2019). Architecture is proven to be a very useful tool when it comes to designing environments as shown by Durand in her work.

For Honor, 2017

The above image shows Durand’s work on For Honor and her use of architectural concepts and methods in order to create realistic environments. Use of architectural concepts can be very helpful when it comes to designing environments and creating both realistic and believable environments.

One method I really love about environment design is placing objects in a human way. From the article, Environmental storytelling, Stewart really digs into the concept of telling a story through the environment by allowing the player to think about the people that may have interacted with that environment in the past. I love the idea of taking the time to arrange objects in a way that living people might have (Stewart 2015)

Tachibana 2019

I love the above image from Tachibana’s article. There’s just something about it that just feels so human. There are cupboards open, dishes on the counter, sticky notes on the wall, multiple items are amiss. It allows the viewer to imagine the person that had interacted with this environment to make it look the way it does. They create a story in their head to fit what they are observing. Placing objects carefully in this way gives the game world overall more meaning and gives the player something more to explore each time they play through the game (Stewart 2015).

Discussion

Over the course of my research and this deep dive, I gathered many different methods and concepts on how to make an environment realistic and believable. I really enjoyed looking into how to make environments feel human and to think about how to make the player imagine the people that may have interacted with the environment. That is one of my favorite concepts when it comes to environment design is how to make these environments feel real and human! This was the main takeaway I really wanted to get out of this deep dive, and I hope you, the reader, found this concept as interesting as I did.

I gained a lot of really useful and interesting tools to use when it comes to designing an environment that I am excited to apply to my future work. I learned from industry professionals and beginners alike to learn how to tell a story through the environment and how to clutter an environment well.

My objective for this deep dive was to understand methods used by environment designers to make believable and real feeling environments and share that with other environment designers. I learned a variety of methods that designers use including architectural knowledge and color theory. I also learned a bit about the importance of making these environments feel human like in order to help convey the story and other important themes. I used these different games used in the sources I found and games I believed personally to convey these methods well. This research helped me to advance my skills for creating believable environments and I hope it can help other environments designers create believable environments as well!

As much as I learned from this deep dive, I believe others can also gain from it as well. I think that the methods I touched on and learned from other artists can be proven helpful to environment designers in order to help improve their design skills. By looking at games such as Resident Evil and Last of Us, one can draw from them to see how they use the environment masterfully to tell a subtle story to the player. Many of the sources I reviewed used vocabulary used by industry professionals which will help me present my work with more accuracy and professionalism as well as further describe my skills and toolset.

The main takeaways I gathered from this deep dive is how to convey narrative through an environment, elicit emotions from players through these environments, and make sure these environments feel real and like actual humans had interacted with it. I think it is good overall to draw from many different sources to get perspectives from both experienced designers and beginners like myself. These takeaways are important for environment artists of all levels as we as designers can always keep learning and growing our skills. By observing many different people’s processes and methods for environment design, we can diversify our skills and learn as much as we can!

Conclusion

This deep dive allowed me to take a look at other designers’ processes in order to learn new ways of doing things and let me improve and expand upon my existing skills. The main points gathered from this deep dive are different methods used to make game environments, drawing from architecture and interior design, telling a story through the environment, and how to make a space feel real and human. Methods such as use of color, scope of space, weather, light and shadow, and inversion can help elicit emotion from the player in an environment. By using architectural concepts, the designer can create an accurate and believable environment. Finally, one of my favorite parts of environment design and this deep dive, is telling a story subtly through narrative and placing human feeling clutter in the environment. By placing objects that players can observe, but not do anything with, the designer can insinuate that something happened there. By using these objects, and placing objects in a way humans would have, such as slightly askew, an environment can feel more believable and real.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

References

CGMA, C. G. M. A. (2022, February 28). Five ways to elicit emotion through environment design. CGMA Blog. Retrieved from https://blog.cgmasteracademy.com/five-ways-to-elicit-emotion-through-environment-design/

Durand, L. (2019, July 19). Environment design for AAA games with Laurie Durand. 80lv. Retrieved from https://80.lv/articles/environment-design-for-aaa-games-with-laurie-durand/

McRae, E. (2017, August 9). Designing game environments that are rich with story. EDWIN MCRAE. Retrieved from https://www.edmcrae.com/article/designing-game-environments-that-are-rich-with-story

Stewart, B. (2015, November 12). Environmental storytelling. Game Developer. Retrieved from https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/environmental-storytelling

Straley, B.. (2013). Last of Us [video game]. Sony Entertainment.

Tachibana, K. (2019, September 8). Creating beauty out of clutter. 80lv. Retrieved October 11, 2022, from https://80.lv/articles/creating-beauty-out-of-clutter/