The art of designing (tooling up)

Description: I'm not sure if this has been presented here before, but I though I would write a smallish post to help all of the startups and first time game developers out there. This first post is simply about tool design as this seems to be an area that many startups and new games developers overlook.

This series of articles were originally posted to the alt.games.programming newsgroup and I felt the might be useful. They are reprinted here by permission of the author.

Tooling Up

Ok, so you've got your great game idea and your ready to go. This is the point that you should force yourself to stop and take a long hard look at what your going to need to make this design a reality. The first thing you will notice is that you need three things

1. People
2. Equipment.
3. A strong largely fixed game design.

It's all good and well diving straight into the engine coding and creating a new Unreal or Prey alike engine, but what about the level design and the texture maps?

Looking Ahead

Most first time developers don't give level design or creature animation a second thought until the engine is completed. Instead choosing to base these things on what the final engine is capable of. What they fail to remember is that even the most technically advanced engine will need good levels to make it shine, textures to set the mood of the locations and creatures to scare the pants off the players.

Completing the game engine is about 10% of the games design. The other 90% is taken up with level designs, creature designs, advancing the plots, gameplay, scripting of AI's etc etc. Without this other 90% your final game will remain nothing more than a technically advanced engine.

To help you see my point, lets do a little exercise.

Recall a game you have recently played, preferably something that was out recently, like Unreal or Quake II. Now ask yourself this simple question, what sticks in your mind most about those games. Is it the graphics, the sound or the mood that the levels gave and a particularly difficult creature you encountered?

The chances are that the mood and that annoyingly difficult creature are what you remember most. Very few of you will have said "that game had a really cool game engine". The reality of the situation is that most of us will play a game with great atmostphere and level design, even if the graphics are not the latest hot thing.

Designing Your Tools

So when should you start to design your tools and what tools will you need to design?

These are difficult question at first glance, but they have simple solutions.

The answer to when to create these tools is to design your tools in parallel with the engine. As the engine progresses so to do your tools, incorporating the new engine features along the way.

The level designer and object editor/animator will usually end up using cut down versions of the final game engine. Though this necessitates a modular and well structured engine (we will cover the design of an actual tool in another posting if I get enough requests for it).

The second answer as to what tools you will need is more annoying. You should expect to design tools for Level designing, texture design (though you can often get away with using a good 2D art package), Sound playback, Object design and object animation (often the most difficult tool to create) and a file manipulation compression tool.

Remember that your tools only need to produce textures and object models in a format that the engine can make use of. The person designing these tools should therefore only need to know the final output file format which will be documented along with the engine code, to begin creating the tool.

The level editor is slightly different, in that you will want to see the levels in a state that is identical to the final in game level.For this reason the level editor is often designed as a user friendly front end for the game engine. This also has the added advantage of allowing real data to be available to the engine designer at a much earlier stage in the development cycle. This will show up such common bugs as ill fitting tiles or shear. It also allows the artists to become familiar with the engine, by seeing their work as it will look in the final game. They are then able to better decide what will and will not work within the design of a level.

Another important thing to remember is that the tools should allow access to all of the engines functions. This can be a slightly more tricky feature to implement in tool design, especially when the engine is in an early stage of development or a feature has not been finalised.

I have found that a wise course of action is to only have features available in a tool if they have been finalised and will not be changed. There is nothing worse that having to redesign an entire level and it's associated textures, simply because the dynamic lighting the artist put into it is no longer a feature of the engine.

Conclusion

The sucessful games designer (in these times game director would be more appropriate) must co-ordinate not just the design of an engine able to make her\his dream a reality, but must also ensure that she has the tools to allow her artists and AI people to sculpt that dream.

You can now download the better part of a dozen excellent engines from the web, noted amongst them the golgotha engine, but without the tools to create the levels and textures to stick in these engines they are nothing more than 20 thousand + lines of code. While the game engine remains the sexiest part of the game to work on and design, it is akin to having a brain covered by a blank featureless face.

I can not stress enough that without the tools to create the face and to paint those lips and eyelids just right, you are left staring at a rather un-attractive lump of grey jelly. Capable of doing incredible things? yes, but without the arms and legs to make those things a reality they will remain simply dreams.