How to Survive a Sinking Ship (By Simon Craghead)

Friday 25 June 2010


As an environment artist at Crystal Dynamics, my job is to build the world that the player explores and interacts with. There are many considerations that go into creating a fun video game environment. Some of the them are technical, some are more artistic, while others focus on the game play or the story. All of these elements are vital to the player's enjoyment of the finished game, which is why game development is a very collaborative process.
One of the fun aspects of working in the games industry is that things are changing all the time. Technology and tools are constantly evolving and so are the expectations of gamers. Often, we set creative goals at the beginning of a project, not knowing exactly how, or even if, we can achieve them. This is a really exciting element of making games. On Tomb Raider: Underworld, one of these challenges involved a sequence where Lara escapes from a sinking ship.

The creative brief was something like this: after rescuing her friends from a burning mansion, battling the kraken (a giant octopus,) and narrowly escaping a watery grave, Lara finds herself surrounded by lethal mercenaries on a freighter in the middle of the Mediterranean. Pursuing a relic stolen from her earlier in the level, she blasts her way to the lower decks of the ship where she meets some familiar faces and has a few shocking revelations. Oh... and the ship sinks.


Basically, at the end of level one we wanted to put Lara in an exciting “action movie” situation where things keep progressing from bad to worse, forcing the player to be creative and to use the environment in unexpected ways. Escaping from a sinking ship was a fun way to do this and while putting Lara in a new setting for a Tomb Raider game.
Although the team was excited about the concept for this sequence, it was almost cut from the game several times because no one was actually sure if we could technically pull it off.
A big part of the challenge was that our game engine had never really been used to do something like this. To make it work, we would need to turn a large section of the ship interior into a dynamic object and fill it with smaller objects that would tumble around as the ship starts sinking.
We’d had large moving objects in our environments before, but never a large moving object that actually was the environment. From a technical standpoint, the biggest hurdle would be ensuring that the player model and the game camera played nicely with the environment as it moved around. To the average game player, this may not sound like a big deal, but I assure you, in "game engine" world, this is the kind of technical challenge that keeps programmers and producers awake at night.


From a design and art standpoint, there were additional challenges. This ship sinking madness happens early in the game, so, while we had to make sure that the excitement factor was high, we also had to ensure that the difficulty level wasn't punishing for a novice player.
The sequence was meant to be fast paced, which meant we would need to quickly establish consistent ways for Lara to climb through vertical spaces in the ship which made clear visual sense to the player.
To help solve this, we used lighting and materials to give the player visual cues about where to go next. We also employed bundles of round pipes as a kind of "visual language" to guide the player.
How obvious should a path be before it becomes boring, and how challenging should a puzzle be before it's totally frustrating? These are questions we're constantly asking ourselves. As artists and designers it’s vital to the players’ enjoyment that we strike a healthy balance between design clarity, game play challenge, and visual realism.


Of course, if we do our jobs well, the player should never even think about any of this. The game should be so engaging that all of our hard work just blends seamlessly together into an exciting, fun player experience, which is something that I feel we've achieved in Tomb Raider: Underworld.
Thanks for reading! I hope you've enjoyed this brief look at some of the challenges that we faced making the latest Lara Croft adventure. Tomb Raider: Underworld has been a huge team effort over several years and the result is a game that I think we're all very proud of.
-Simon

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