University final year project Level - crit needed.

[manhuntworld]

Hey guys, im new to the forum. I was adviced by Daniel Grafstrom, senior level designer for F.E.AR 2, to sign up to this forum as it has some great support and good advice and critque for levels/maps etc.

The crack basically is that i'm in my third year and the time has come to do my final year project. As i am studying games design as a degree i have covered most aspects of it, like design documents, 3d environments using max, character modelling, facial modelling, and games engines. I don't mind 3D work, but i found my true desire was to be a level designer. So i shall not bore you no more and cut to the chace, basically im using the unreal 3 editor as i have to learn another engine. I've started of using the source engine and have been for a while now so it was time to learn unreal.

Basically my final year project title is "How fear and tension is incorporated into a game environment" in other words, how do you make a level scary. what techniques etc. so at the moment i've got some of my level done, and played around with the lighting, and tried to make it flow alot better as the idea at the end of making this level is to test it on candidates, record their reactions when certain events happen in the level like, debre falling, lights turning on and off, sudden noises. As you can tell im going for a very F.E.A.R / Condemned approach as i feel those two games use those techniques very well.

Here are some screen shots of my current situation of the level, any critique would be very helpful. i will be updating this post quite often aswell, so please keep checking back. thanks.

This is the starting room, underground passage/sewer:

This is the second room (machine room/Maintenance)

This is leading down to the long hallway further down.

This is the long hallway leading to the factory level, now i know that long hallways and corridors are often frowned upon and should be avoid, but for this instance i actually need this because i will be using a kismet script to turn all the lights off individually from the back to the front, just like in the film the matrix if you remember. so basically it looks like darkeness is coming toward the player etc.

Just to add, not all the textures are final, so if you guys reccommened using any other textures in places, please do say

more to come soon.

[dux]

Greetings.

Right, first thing I would do from looking at those first few pictures is change that floor texture. Stat. It just doesn't work.

The first picture is black for me, cannot see a thing. Brighten it up some.

And the long hallways are just flat and lifeless, could use some kind of detail, anything.

[sarge mat]

Hey.

The textures on the roof look like they are scaled down too low make them bigger. Also a lot of the props look very random or don't fit. My advice from personal experience would be to rip most of them out and start again. Take each area and build some really interesting things for the player to focus on and detail the area around them from that. Put props together to make bigger objects that are more detailed. Look at pro levels and that the number one rule for Unreal. A lot of the BSP looks way out of scale too like walls being too high for the width.

Good Luck!

[Tron]

If you are going for suspense then you don't want the player to be able to see everything. That doesn't mean you have to make everything dark as in your first screenshot, rather get some contrast in the lighting. Get some structures in there that obstruct the players view slightly. Even just something basic like a few pillars here and there will help immensely if you want the player questioning what is lurking in the room with them. Large open environments like you have work best when they are contrasted with the type I just described. When the player enters one of these large open well lit rooms they should pause because they are so used to thinking something is lurking around that any apparently safe area looks like a trap.

[manhuntworld]

Thanks guys. this critque has been very helpful. I will adapt it to the level and hopefully get some screenshots updated soon.

[2d-chris]

Some little things that will help, visually anyway

If your goal is fear, lighting is your number one tool for that, take this standard corridor ...

1. Continueous lighting all the way down a corridor completely breaks the suspense, no suprises and I can see everything, works much better if you can use darkness to your advantage. Light a few areas of the corridor but leave some parts almost pitch black, keeps you guessing! Light sources from outside of the corridor work very well too. Contrast is key here, dark levels are _very_ tough ... overbright the important areas to make sure even with a dark screen/brightness setup the level will be bright enough where it matters!!!

2. Open up some areas outside the corridor and have flashing lights/sounds fom behind them

3. Most of your lights should be disabled, keep them there for art reasons but have them turned off. The one you do have on should serve as a kind of checkpoint where you aim towards. Also use some colors not just white, red and yellow and orange are good colors to use if fear is your objective. If you want to be clever you can try reversing this an use happy colors (green, blue) to prove a sense of calm before the storm. Thats more for single player scripting.

4. Keep the exit illuminated what ever you do

5. Use flashing/moving lights carefully, a good tip if you want flashing lights is to always have a constant fixed light and the flash adding a little movement, flashing light by itself is usually too strong.

6. Play with shadows if you can, place light sources where you get the most interesting (or scary) shadows possible, although this is very dependant on technology.

[manhuntworld]

thanks 2d-chris, yes lighting is very important in my level, and thanks alos for the time to show me what you mean on my screenshot. really apprieciate this. I have got a kismet sequence in which in that hallway once the player enter it the lights go off from the back to the front, as if the darkness comes towards you, just one problem, im not sure how to incorporate sound into the sequence in qwhen the lights go off. other than that i think it works. i will get a vid up soon as pos to show you what i mean. thanks to all aswell.

[Schmung]

Further to what the other guys have said, what strikes me about this is that there's not really a sense of place. There doesn't seem to be any coherency or purpose to the placement of things in there that suggests what the area is or what any of the props in the room are doing. It all looks a bit too random at the moment. If you're aiming to scare to people then you need to keep them immersed and an environment that's too obviously artificial and obvious isn't going to help you. If you build something convincing that feels like a real place then building the scares in will come a lot easier.

Other people have mentioned the textures - you've got a couple of issues here.

Some of them aren't tiling too well, they have obvious artefacts when they are tiled.

Inconsistency of scale between textures

Alignment issues up the wazoo (the huge-o grate in the floor is a good example of this)

Excessive normalling; whereby it looks like you've auto generated the normal for the sake of having it and some areas of the texture have way more depth than they should. The floor texture for instance.

I can't find it right now, but back in the HL1 days there was a fairly nifty article by (I think) valve that covered creating a texture set and gave some decent advice on what elements you wanted to include and how to make it work together. Things have changed somewhat since then, but it's still worth a read if you can track it down.

[Serenius]

A few images about what scary lighting looks like to go with what 2dChris said about the lighting. Really bright areas around the stuff you want the player looking at, dark shadow in any areas you want them to ignore (and possibly throw out a few noises from to go for the scare). A good trick to see if you made your lit areas bright enough is to either turn the brightness and contrast of your monitor way down, or jack up the mid-range under the world properties->post processing up to 1.5ish. If the areas with lights still look like they're lit up, then your lights are probably bright enough.

http://ps3media.ign.com/ps3/image/artic ... 0_640w.jpg

http://xbox360media.ign.com/xbox360/ima ... 1_640w.jpg

http://www.definitivejux.net/files/u3/bioshock_06.jpg

http://vgfive.files.wordpress.com/2007/10/bioshock1.jpg

http://savepoints.files.wordpress.com/2 ... ay0012.jpg

http://2.gvt0.com/vi/E2fPFb6P8oY/0.jpg

http://img530.imageshack.us/img530/9021 ... ay0ht9.jpg

[2d-chris]

Man that Big daddy being green (usually means safe) really fecks with your perception! With the orange environment lighting :] Never noticed it before but it's very well thought out. Opposites attract!

[-HP-]

careful with the lighting on the game following this link, its so good it's NSFW!

sex

http://www.dropbox.com/gallery/2857307/ ... 3?h=edb668

[manhuntworld]

Thanks for all the critque guys. really been helpful. I've got some updates on what i've been doing. I firstly apologies if you can't seen or are having trouble to see any of the images of my level as it is quite dark, its just that my monitor has a high contrast ratio so it may appear alot darker for some other people.

some bits have been changed more than others. i've been working alot more on the kismet and matinee sequences trying to get them up to speed.

as always, constructive critque is greatly apprieciated to help improve my level.

thanks guys.

[manhuntworld]

Another things guys, if you notice on my first picture, the door is completely black and is not recieving any light. its an interpolating actor because im using matinee to animate it opening, i've made dynamic lights in the room, made sure it accepts dynamic lights but yet it stays completely unlit. any ideas to why this is?? cheers.

[Serenius]

Another things guys, if you notice on my first picture, the door is completely black and is not recieving any light. its an interpolating actor because im using matinee to animate it opening, i've made dynamic lights in the room, made sure it accepts dynamic lights but yet it stays completely unlit. any ideas to why this is?? cheers.

You don't want to make the lights dynamic. That's way too expensive in UE3. All you need to do is enable "lighting environment" on your mover/interp actor and it will light up just fine.

[Serenius]

Overall the lighting is still too uniform. You want more shadows and more contrasting light colors. Here's a quick crappy example I did in Gimp. It's a little overemphasized to illustrate what people are talking about.

First thing was lowering the global brightness to get some good dark areas. The lamps look like they should be casting blue light, so you can see the two variations shown and how much they should light up the area right around them (really bright around the lights, really dark elsewhere). Looks like you have a window of some type on the right, which is a great spot to use some nice contrasting orange light cast through the grating as illustrated. The idea is to light up the areas you want the player to look, while leaving the other areas shrouded in shadow. I'm sure some of the more graphically inclined here could paint a better picture with some photochoppery, but hopefully this gives you the idea.