Design :: Day 008

Design is an iterative process

There are many instances where I felt a design is lacking in something or I get some vague but valid feedback of a similar nature. It can get a little tricky finding what exactly it is lacking in and how I can remedy it. Is it a small tweak or does it require an overhaul?

Back when I was fresh out of college, I’m sure many others can relate to the desire to prove (to yourself and others) that you’re hot shit and that they’re not making a mistake hiring you. In reality, you might know a thing or two but you probably still lack the wisdom that only experience can impart. You’re not quite sure of the best course of action for a feedback you receive, and you can also make missteps by thinking that there’s something extra you can offer which the others might not have thought about. To be fair, sometimes you might be on to something and that youthful exuberance can be a nice thing to have in a team. As a more experienced designer, you can still fall for that but you’re probably able to make more informed decisions based on your experience. None of us are infallible so it’s good to keep that at the back of your mind as you go about your work.

Assassin’s Creed Origins was the first AAA title I worked on. I inherited Kerkesoucha Granary in Faiyum from several more experienced designers as they took on other more demanding tasks.

The part where the video starts is one example where adding something small added something valuable to the experience: a second layer of navigation helps with traversing this area undetected and giving the player a good overview of the area as they move through it.

Later on in the video, around the 2:20 mark, my inexperience at that time made me think that I could offer something extra by adding multiple guards in and around the grain silos. This, I realized later on, was a bad idea as it meant that the area became hard to read and that a fight happening on the ground could alert guards on the top of the silos that the player might not even realize are there. Worst still, the player could easily be exposed while sneaking by a guard that’s out of view on top of the silos.

Not surprisingly, I reverted my changes and instead focused my efforts on improving the experience by focusing on two goals for the grain silos section:

• Making navigation here clearer, especially for stealth
• Placing the guards at more obvious points

The stealth navigation path was highly utilized in the video. However, the guards happen to not be there during the video, but if they were, they’d be around the fire, making it easy to spot them from far and plan your route.

Conclusion

So what did this experience taught me? Plenty actually. Entrusted to work on such a major location is an honor, especially as a designer fresh from school. The experience itself is a masterclass in level design where the big strokes have already been done by the more experienced designers and there was much I could glean just from studying it.

But one thing that stood out was the fact that design is an iterative process and having to redo and change your design over time isn’t a problem with you but it is a normal process even in a AAA games studio (and just about anywhere). We were all working towards a single vision but as the different designers took on the location, we applied our take on it. With every pass, we iterated on it – changing a thing here and adjusted a thing there. The design lead would keep us in check and steer our course but we’re free to exercise our creative freedom as we see fit within the established limits.

Even if it was the same designer working on it from the beginning and if they had all the resources ready at the get-go, it would be foolish to think that they’d be able to produce something as polished and interesting as what we shipped in just one iteration. The fact that we revisited the design of the location throughout production, acted on feedback, reverted designs that didn’t work out, and tested different ideas on how to make the experience more fun and interesting goes to show that it would be highly improbable to hit all the right notes on your first attempt. The more complicated the design is, the higher the likelihood that we need to iterate more on it before it is good.

To quote a stretchy orange cartoon dog

“Dude, sucking at something is the first step to being sorta good at something.”

– Jake the Dog, Adventure Time