INTRODUCTION
Computers and gaming were a large part of my existence for a good number of years now. One long-lost distant summer, somewhere within the early 1980s, a childhood introduction was made that led to one of the more transformative events in my life so far. I can still recall the somewhat profoundly experienced moment of realizing that image and sound, on a television screen, could be manipulated and controlled - that the viewer had a choice, and free will to exercise over all that would otherwise wash inward.
Suddenly all of the noise, bluster, and chaos typically radiating unrelentingly outward from the television screen could be silenced, reset, and wiped clean, all with the simple press of a power button. Within the void created in its absence, colorfully humble, interactive 8-bit graphics and audio would fill the frame, entrancing the senses, thoroughly captivating the mind and heart of that young child. I was hooked, for sure, and much time afterwards was spent eagerly absorbing all the sights and sounds that electronic games of the time could offer, and that my sponge-like mind could drink in.
Somewhere around the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the primordial inception of the early 90s music revolution, the landscape of my youth was altered again. This time around, the sea change involved a lovely, dovetailed union of two poignant introductions crossing my path, very nearly concurrently occurring. With the personal computer, there was now a way, and the means to better articulate, shape, and hone what was onscreen, and from active exploration, a whole world was opened up to dive into.
By chance, I had also discovered that the culmination of many favorite gaming experiences of the time, such as adventure games and RPGs, to my surprise, were originally conceived and born as computer software. There was now a fresh new wave to ride, containing all manner of realms within that new, computer-based world to savor and explore. The hook had worked its way in deeper, and I actively sought out these exciting worlds being created within the burgeoning gaming industry.
Having always been an aesthetically motivated, sensory-based being, and otherwise an artist for my whole life, I left for school to further my creative forays into visual fine art, with graphic design, painting, and a variety of 2D-based mediums. Throughout this time, the computer and all of the exciting, rich, gaming experiences unfolding there in that space were with me, though always as an impassioned hobby - as exploratory relief and play - rather than anything scholastically studied. In those days, there simply wasn't much available as courses along the lines of gaming related graphics, and any computer-based art offerings were still in their relative infancy.
In hindsight, much of the appeal of gaming for me, and also with the gaming industry, was its rather off-the-map, Wild West-like, grass roots, if not humble development mindset, along with a looser, and naturally intimate creation environment - or so I impressionistically gathered. Even further, I believed that this spirit and context infused itself into the very games born of the times, becoming a part of, and translating directly into what the user would experience on screen, which was all a tremendous part of the appeal, drawing me further, and further in. Indeed, a few of my favorite, standout titles encountered during my time at school led me directly towards the start of my career as an environment artist. Shortly after graduating, I discovered from a friend that one of my favorite developers was hiring, ramping up for the next Elder Scrolls title - Morrowind - which was being developed in their Maryland-based studio, soon to be my home for the next 15 years.
Suddenly all of the noise, bluster, and chaos typically radiating unrelentingly outward from the television screen could be silenced, reset, and wiped clean, all with the simple press of a power button. Within the void created in its absence, colorfully humble, interactive 8-bit graphics and audio would fill the frame, entrancing the senses, thoroughly captivating the mind and heart of that young child. I was hooked, for sure, and much time afterwards was spent eagerly absorbing all the sights and sounds that electronic games of the time could offer, and that my sponge-like mind could drink in.
Somewhere around the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the primordial inception of the early 90s music revolution, the landscape of my youth was altered again. This time around, the sea change involved a lovely, dovetailed union of two poignant introductions crossing my path, very nearly concurrently occurring. With the personal computer, there was now a way, and the means to better articulate, shape, and hone what was onscreen, and from active exploration, a whole world was opened up to dive into.
By chance, I had also discovered that the culmination of many favorite gaming experiences of the time, such as adventure games and RPGs, to my surprise, were originally conceived and born as computer software. There was now a fresh new wave to ride, containing all manner of realms within that new, computer-based world to savor and explore. The hook had worked its way in deeper, and I actively sought out these exciting worlds being created within the burgeoning gaming industry.
Having always been an aesthetically motivated, sensory-based being, and otherwise an artist for my whole life, I left for school to further my creative forays into visual fine art, with graphic design, painting, and a variety of 2D-based mediums. Throughout this time, the computer and all of the exciting, rich, gaming experiences unfolding there in that space were with me, though always as an impassioned hobby - as exploratory relief and play - rather than anything scholastically studied. In those days, there simply wasn't much available as courses along the lines of gaming related graphics, and any computer-based art offerings were still in their relative infancy.
In hindsight, much of the appeal of gaming for me, and also with the gaming industry, was its rather off-the-map, Wild West-like, grass roots, if not humble development mindset, along with a looser, and naturally intimate creation environment - or so I impressionistically gathered. Even further, I believed that this spirit and context infused itself into the very games born of the times, becoming a part of, and translating directly into what the user would experience on screen, which was all a tremendous part of the appeal, drawing me further, and further in. Indeed, a few of my favorite, standout titles encountered during my time at school led me directly towards the start of my career as an environment artist. Shortly after graduating, I discovered from a friend that one of my favorite developers was hiring, ramping up for the next Elder Scrolls title - Morrowind - which was being developed in their Maryland-based studio, soon to be my home for the next 15 years.
OPEN WORLD DESIGN
From the very beginning, open world, 3D environments have held a tremendous appeal, and a powerful attraction for both the player and the developer. With their more naturally paced, non-linear play and explorative flow, as well as their often simulative nature with regard to presentation and construction, I have always lovingly held them in very high regard. Looking back to my favorite titles over the years, I can see in them all, shades and elements of open world design that detail and give life to, if not outright steer, what it is like to truly be within their environs.
At the outset, I sought to keep the player's experience - from their actual view and perspective, as well as with the unfolding of any and all progressive gameplay events - fully in mind. In creation, I would posit questions: What is the player's arc throughout the game? What is the backstory? How about the perceived tone? Will the world presented be a somber place, or one full of wonder and joy? Is it to represent reality, or be more fantastical in nature? What about the gameplay - is the world something akin to a principal actor, taking center stage, or rather a mechanism for more complex interaction, in and of itself? Is it merely there as a non-interactive vessel for some other form of gameplay? Simply said, establish the nature of what you want the player to fundamentally experience, then begin to shape the world and its construction around that goal.
From a visual perspective, scale is often one of the very first questions to resolve when bringing any world out of idea land, and into a more tangible reality. This answering process will often be grounded in, if not constrained somewhat by other design and engineering related factors. How big will the desired play space be for the player - is it more the size of a city, or an entire country? A planet perhaps? How will the world be technically presented - are there segmented levels with loads, or is it one continuous space? Are there any memory, storage footprint, or hardware related concerns that might impact how the world is constructed at basic fundamental levels? Given the desired world scale, to what degree of detail is the resulting environment art made - what are the thresholds for model detail versus texture detail, as the production pipeline and technical specifications accommodate? Doing this kind of question-and-answer legwork up front will steadily provide a healthy set of guidelines to then work within, helping usher forth a brand new world into existence.
With the size and scale of the world, as well as the intended player experience healthily in mind, the creation process begins to move forward from the realm of thought and idea, and onto the initial steps of its basic, physical construction, advancing further into the heart of the development life cycle. While being born and realized, and throughout all subsequent stages, it's important to frequently check back with some of the initially proposed design goals and questions - especially with regard to player experience, as it will undoubtedly (and probably should) fluidly evolve and grow over time, given the nature of building such a massive and complex environment. This very act of creation itself will lead to new questions arising to the surface of consciousness, otherwise unaccounted for at early stages.
While basic fundamentals and constituents - as an example, the square footage of your new world - will hopefully not be dramatically reconfigured or otherwise change, it can happen, and there will be occasions to retool something that no longer fits in with ongoing growth and iteration, or to retrofit a new, broadly reaching directive across a massive amount of affected data such as landscape, terrain, environment art props and related assets, and so on. Deeply solving for this basic framework with care and consideration, then designing around many of the types of questions touched upon here from the outset, even if it's simply to allow room for unknowns and error at later stages, will help the life blood of an open world game - the world itself - be in a good, solid place that positively underpins and foundationally supports all that is subsequently created.
At the outset, I sought to keep the player's experience - from their actual view and perspective, as well as with the unfolding of any and all progressive gameplay events - fully in mind. In creation, I would posit questions: What is the player's arc throughout the game? What is the backstory? How about the perceived tone? Will the world presented be a somber place, or one full of wonder and joy? Is it to represent reality, or be more fantastical in nature? What about the gameplay - is the world something akin to a principal actor, taking center stage, or rather a mechanism for more complex interaction, in and of itself? Is it merely there as a non-interactive vessel for some other form of gameplay? Simply said, establish the nature of what you want the player to fundamentally experience, then begin to shape the world and its construction around that goal.
From a visual perspective, scale is often one of the very first questions to resolve when bringing any world out of idea land, and into a more tangible reality. This answering process will often be grounded in, if not constrained somewhat by other design and engineering related factors. How big will the desired play space be for the player - is it more the size of a city, or an entire country? A planet perhaps? How will the world be technically presented - are there segmented levels with loads, or is it one continuous space? Are there any memory, storage footprint, or hardware related concerns that might impact how the world is constructed at basic fundamental levels? Given the desired world scale, to what degree of detail is the resulting environment art made - what are the thresholds for model detail versus texture detail, as the production pipeline and technical specifications accommodate? Doing this kind of question-and-answer legwork up front will steadily provide a healthy set of guidelines to then work within, helping usher forth a brand new world into existence.
With the size and scale of the world, as well as the intended player experience healthily in mind, the creation process begins to move forward from the realm of thought and idea, and onto the initial steps of its basic, physical construction, advancing further into the heart of the development life cycle. While being born and realized, and throughout all subsequent stages, it's important to frequently check back with some of the initially proposed design goals and questions - especially with regard to player experience, as it will undoubtedly (and probably should) fluidly evolve and grow over time, given the nature of building such a massive and complex environment. This very act of creation itself will lead to new questions arising to the surface of consciousness, otherwise unaccounted for at early stages.
While basic fundamentals and constituents - as an example, the square footage of your new world - will hopefully not be dramatically reconfigured or otherwise change, it can happen, and there will be occasions to retool something that no longer fits in with ongoing growth and iteration, or to retrofit a new, broadly reaching directive across a massive amount of affected data such as landscape, terrain, environment art props and related assets, and so on. Deeply solving for this basic framework with care and consideration, then designing around many of the types of questions touched upon here from the outset, even if it's simply to allow room for unknowns and error at later stages, will help the life blood of an open world game - the world itself - be in a good, solid place that positively underpins and foundationally supports all that is subsequently created.
THE LOOK OF OPEN WORLD GAMES
In the earlier days, visuals for new worlds began their shape taking process almost purely within the mind's eye of the artist. With input from the director, and often from pre-existing lore, the process for establishing a visual identity begins with continued imagining of how this new world should look and feel, from the combination of light, color, and various surfaces to work with. This step is a further, albeit visually oriented, iteration on defining what the end user will experience, as they take in and explore the world.
Based on the particulars of the project at hand, real world references of nearly any kind, photos, film stills, screenshots, color palettes, and the like, would be gathered and readily used - even as guides or inspiration for alien and otherwise otherworldly environs - to hone in on tangible bits of information for the beginning stages of world creation. Atmosphere and mood play a critical role here, and these early idea sketches go a long way to continually champion the laborious, lengthy undertaking of bringing landscapes and game worlds to life.
With more recent development cycles, much of this initial visual creation work would fall into the realm of dedicated concept artists, where freshly created, traditional 2D art is referenced to help establish the predominant tone, iterate upon specific visual features and key details, and for any stylization of the overall character with the world being made. A strong goal in defining the visuals for an open world is to strive for a tangible sense of time and place for the audience, where they are usually intended to feel immersed within the environment.
Just considering artwork, this player experienced sensation can come from a medley of many different graphically related factors working together in tandem, such as - as often the case with large exterior environments - the quality of daylight and atmosphere, down to the nature of the different surfaces and physical features of the world. Something seemingly simple as the silhouette for frequently occurring tree types can have a significant effect on the player's perception of the world.
As an example, broad and dominant deciduous foliage density might lend a quality of feeling encapsulated, or enwombed by the environment. These feelings could instill a desire in the player to slow their pacing down a bit, giving them pause to more thoroughly explore a location, in a measured, even relaxed fashion. Using a darker, muted color palette for this same forested environment could simulate an atmosphere with an unsettling feel, directly translating to the experience of being in that forest. Or, perhaps, using a cheerfully saturated palette, a sense of wistful enchantment and playfulness could be instilled within the explorer.
In contrast, what if these same broad-leafed trees were instead tall evergreens, having a more open, jagged, vertical profile? This same location might instead lead the player's eye upward, towards distant landmarks visible towards the horizon, subconsciously ushering them forward within the space. Any art and visual element used within a location can affect the player's experience in such ways, and is important that these early, broad visual strokes serve to flesh out and enrich the overarching design and player experience goals for the project.
Based on the particulars of the project at hand, real world references of nearly any kind, photos, film stills, screenshots, color palettes, and the like, would be gathered and readily used - even as guides or inspiration for alien and otherwise otherworldly environs - to hone in on tangible bits of information for the beginning stages of world creation. Atmosphere and mood play a critical role here, and these early idea sketches go a long way to continually champion the laborious, lengthy undertaking of bringing landscapes and game worlds to life.
With more recent development cycles, much of this initial visual creation work would fall into the realm of dedicated concept artists, where freshly created, traditional 2D art is referenced to help establish the predominant tone, iterate upon specific visual features and key details, and for any stylization of the overall character with the world being made. A strong goal in defining the visuals for an open world is to strive for a tangible sense of time and place for the audience, where they are usually intended to feel immersed within the environment.
Just considering artwork, this player experienced sensation can come from a medley of many different graphically related factors working together in tandem, such as - as often the case with large exterior environments - the quality of daylight and atmosphere, down to the nature of the different surfaces and physical features of the world. Something seemingly simple as the silhouette for frequently occurring tree types can have a significant effect on the player's perception of the world.
As an example, broad and dominant deciduous foliage density might lend a quality of feeling encapsulated, or enwombed by the environment. These feelings could instill a desire in the player to slow their pacing down a bit, giving them pause to more thoroughly explore a location, in a measured, even relaxed fashion. Using a darker, muted color palette for this same forested environment could simulate an atmosphere with an unsettling feel, directly translating to the experience of being in that forest. Or, perhaps, using a cheerfully saturated palette, a sense of wistful enchantment and playfulness could be instilled within the explorer.
In contrast, what if these same broad-leafed trees were instead tall evergreens, having a more open, jagged, vertical profile? This same location might instead lead the player's eye upward, towards distant landmarks visible towards the horizon, subconsciously ushering them forward within the space. Any art and visual element used within a location can affect the player's experience in such ways, and is important that these early, broad visual strokes serve to flesh out and enrich the overarching design and player experience goals for the project.
MAP DESIGN OF AN OPEN WORLD
Having worked with large, open worlds within storied and sequelized franchises, there was usually some form of pre-established blueprint in place, creating a delineated sense for basic map features and shapes. In this case, available maps would be gathered and studied, usually to consolidate any disparity within the lore and all the various details from previous maps and their iterations, added or altered over time. With initial map creation for a new title, there was never really an example in my experience where an old map or image could be used unaltered, as it had previously existed. History showed continually that nothing is ever truly set in stone, and all should remain fluid, to better serve the needs of the project at hand.
Sometimes, however, there was cause to create brand new worlds where none had existed prior, other than perhaps within a few one-off words here and there within a dusty design document, and it would be necessary to construct a fresh map. Here, basic outlines and larger geographical, or civilization related features and locations would be established, usually in two dimensions, with careful consideration for the world's scale as it translates to the technical specifications of the engine, of neighboring landmasses (from lore, or in visual context with the game at large), and in accordance with the desired player experience.
The amount of detail defined for the map can easily vary from a few key demarcating lines, to a richer image filled with increasingly smaller local information and color, where either extreme is best chosen for the project at hand in relation to what has been established at earlier stages of world creation. If a great deal is already known about the world in question, it can be better to try and work out the next steps of detail sooner, as it's easier to adapt and iterate in 2D, design document space, than at later stages in a full 3D environment, possibly with many existing layers and passes of environment art detailing.
With this traditional overhead map, world overview image, or document in place, the landmass for the open world environment now has a core framework structure to take shape around. Once again, real world references and data sets can help launch the landmass building process, with manual, or procedural generation tools either filling in the gaps, or creating entirely new spaces from scratch. Iteration, and playful experimentation will lead to good results during this phase, tailoring the work done to the guiding needs of the project at hand, with all its potentially moving targets.
In some cases, a hybrid mixture of modified, Earth-based digital elevation maps, combined in a collage-like fashion, offered a great, rough foundation for large scale terrain layout. In other cases, a more meticulously crafted, custom generated data set solved for particular design requirements upon its importation, where local space world editing and building would otherwise be too time consuming, or tedious for the scales involved. Harness the power of computers, and put them to work for you, when creating large, open world locations. Be fast and loose with features, and iterate with software, stencil masks, procedural noise, etc., to get in and refine as much detail as possible, and to the threshold where is becomes feasible and reasonable for local world construction to take over, down towards 1:1 player scales.
Sometimes, however, there was cause to create brand new worlds where none had existed prior, other than perhaps within a few one-off words here and there within a dusty design document, and it would be necessary to construct a fresh map. Here, basic outlines and larger geographical, or civilization related features and locations would be established, usually in two dimensions, with careful consideration for the world's scale as it translates to the technical specifications of the engine, of neighboring landmasses (from lore, or in visual context with the game at large), and in accordance with the desired player experience.
The amount of detail defined for the map can easily vary from a few key demarcating lines, to a richer image filled with increasingly smaller local information and color, where either extreme is best chosen for the project at hand in relation to what has been established at earlier stages of world creation. If a great deal is already known about the world in question, it can be better to try and work out the next steps of detail sooner, as it's easier to adapt and iterate in 2D, design document space, than at later stages in a full 3D environment, possibly with many existing layers and passes of environment art detailing.
With this traditional overhead map, world overview image, or document in place, the landmass for the open world environment now has a core framework structure to take shape around. Once again, real world references and data sets can help launch the landmass building process, with manual, or procedural generation tools either filling in the gaps, or creating entirely new spaces from scratch. Iteration, and playful experimentation will lead to good results during this phase, tailoring the work done to the guiding needs of the project at hand, with all its potentially moving targets.
In some cases, a hybrid mixture of modified, Earth-based digital elevation maps, combined in a collage-like fashion, offered a great, rough foundation for large scale terrain layout. In other cases, a more meticulously crafted, custom generated data set solved for particular design requirements upon its importation, where local space world editing and building would otherwise be too time consuming, or tedious for the scales involved. Harness the power of computers, and put them to work for you, when creating large, open world locations. Be fast and loose with features, and iterate with software, stencil masks, procedural noise, etc., to get in and refine as much detail as possible, and to the threshold where is becomes feasible and reasonable for local world construction to take over, down towards 1:1 player scales.
PRODUCTION PROCESS FOR BUILDING A WORLD
For a general rule of thumb, start with the largest problems, be they large in an X-Y area sense, or with implementing a key design feature that impacts a significant portion of the game. From there, work down iteratively and progressively into the smaller levels of detail. With landscaping, the artist will usually begin resolving the larger lay of the land - somewhere between the existing world layout in its broadest sense, to what the player will experience from their particular point of view. Larger features like cliffs, valleys, passes, and roads will begin to take shape, where at later steps the artist will add in specific detail and clutter, down to individual rocks and vegetation objects.
The idea is for each change along the way, be it a visual one, or a design related alteration, to have the most positive impact on any and all affected work that happens after, and even farther down the line. Start at the largest scales, addressing the needs there, while considering what the next step will require. It can be a tremendous amount of interrelated tangents to mentally take on and care for, but this kind of creation process navigation and oversight is very much in keeping with the core needs, and interconnected components comprising an open world environment.
As with the reality of open world games, nearly every undertaking in realizing them to completion is a massive one. With the world itself a principal focus of the project, nearly every department is affected by, and tied into it, in some fashion. Every pass and iteration performed requires a bit of a juggling act with consideration for other aspects of the game, and how the overall development process might be impacted.
For example, large landscape features might reach a certain point where they no longer artistically jell with, or support more recent design additions to the world - say, a heavily altered city location. Perhaps a nearby mountain exists at a visually pleasing height, with a nice topographical flow along the horizon when the map was much emptier at early points in the project, but now needs adjustment with regard to freshly added, contextual urban detail. Not only will the mountain's alteration affect environment artists, where they may have painstakingly and beautifully propagated a large area within the world with props and foliage, but programming engineers are now having to help resolve performance issues with regard to new geometry and object-based occlusion sightlines, dramatically impacting the game's rendering and performance for the player. Additionally, designers are further affected by this change, as preexisting AI navigation data sets for the areas in question will need a substantial pass, if not a complete overhaul.
Given the interconnected, kitchen sink nature of an open world, practically every alteration, addition or subtraction, will lead to this kind of constant problem solving. Here, history has shown that considerate, heavy thinking and planning up front, coupled with good, proactive, and clear communication, will lay down a stronger bedrock from a project's outset, allowing each new layer to better weave into the world taking shape, rather than exposing flaws and gaps that lead to a foundational collapse. This intention, as well as the subsequent actions done in its spirit, with others on board in a like-minded manner, helps tremendously with every area of world building.
The idea is for each change along the way, be it a visual one, or a design related alteration, to have the most positive impact on any and all affected work that happens after, and even farther down the line. Start at the largest scales, addressing the needs there, while considering what the next step will require. It can be a tremendous amount of interrelated tangents to mentally take on and care for, but this kind of creation process navigation and oversight is very much in keeping with the core needs, and interconnected components comprising an open world environment.
As with the reality of open world games, nearly every undertaking in realizing them to completion is a massive one. With the world itself a principal focus of the project, nearly every department is affected by, and tied into it, in some fashion. Every pass and iteration performed requires a bit of a juggling act with consideration for other aspects of the game, and how the overall development process might be impacted.
For example, large landscape features might reach a certain point where they no longer artistically jell with, or support more recent design additions to the world - say, a heavily altered city location. Perhaps a nearby mountain exists at a visually pleasing height, with a nice topographical flow along the horizon when the map was much emptier at early points in the project, but now needs adjustment with regard to freshly added, contextual urban detail. Not only will the mountain's alteration affect environment artists, where they may have painstakingly and beautifully propagated a large area within the world with props and foliage, but programming engineers are now having to help resolve performance issues with regard to new geometry and object-based occlusion sightlines, dramatically impacting the game's rendering and performance for the player. Additionally, designers are further affected by this change, as preexisting AI navigation data sets for the areas in question will need a substantial pass, if not a complete overhaul.
Given the interconnected, kitchen sink nature of an open world, practically every alteration, addition or subtraction, will lead to this kind of constant problem solving. Here, history has shown that considerate, heavy thinking and planning up front, coupled with good, proactive, and clear communication, will lay down a stronger bedrock from a project's outset, allowing each new layer to better weave into the world taking shape, rather than exposing flaws and gaps that lead to a foundational collapse. This intention, as well as the subsequent actions done in its spirit, with others on board in a like-minded manner, helps tremendously with every area of world building.
DETAIL LEVELS WITHIN AN OPEN WORLD
When considering the thresholds of information, visual or otherwise, for a role playing title or with any game type, I believe that the intended experience for the player should help govern where time and energy is spent towards establishing detail. As with any creative undertaking, ideas can quickly overtake the reality of realizing and actually implementing them, for any number of reasons. Ultimately, it is about what you want the player to see, hear, play, think, feel, and where the intent resides within those goals.
Simply along visual lines, computer hardware has rapidly advanced over the years to a point where there is a fair amount of headroom for graphical detail to exist in a game environment. Does this kind of deep detail reinforce and support the overall art and design direction for the entire world? Sure, the various tree bark and rock surfaces can be detailed to such a degree that individual clumps of lichen can now be articulated, shaded, and lit - but to what purpose? In this case, is the world presented about stopping and pondering nature, savoring a detail level that has moss growing from antipodean directions to the sun? Or is the game all about getting the player to the next joy trigger as smoothly and deftly as possible, with just enough detail to keep the focal beats strung together? Are both extremes to be accommodated, if not equally appeased? Perhaps detail is wanted from a larger, contextual industry standpoint, where competitor A has 'x' bullet point in their specifications, and maybe competitor B feels compelled to do the same, if only from a more harried mindset involving larger groups of people.
With the sky as the limit for even riffing on what detail should be included, as well as why, time and resources will ultimately end up holding your hand as to what is realistically possible, especially with a complex undertaking like creating an open world game. Focus in on what you want your audience to experience, assess the tools you have to work with and the limits you have to work within, solve for, and implement at larger scales on down, and then detail to a degree that feels right, in every way. Perhaps lovingly layer in even more detail at later stages, as a cleansing breather, or as time allows. A unique joy can be found therein, when its application is undertaken from a good, healthy place and intention.
Simply along visual lines, computer hardware has rapidly advanced over the years to a point where there is a fair amount of headroom for graphical detail to exist in a game environment. Does this kind of deep detail reinforce and support the overall art and design direction for the entire world? Sure, the various tree bark and rock surfaces can be detailed to such a degree that individual clumps of lichen can now be articulated, shaded, and lit - but to what purpose? In this case, is the world presented about stopping and pondering nature, savoring a detail level that has moss growing from antipodean directions to the sun? Or is the game all about getting the player to the next joy trigger as smoothly and deftly as possible, with just enough detail to keep the focal beats strung together? Are both extremes to be accommodated, if not equally appeased? Perhaps detail is wanted from a larger, contextual industry standpoint, where competitor A has 'x' bullet point in their specifications, and maybe competitor B feels compelled to do the same, if only from a more harried mindset involving larger groups of people.
With the sky as the limit for even riffing on what detail should be included, as well as why, time and resources will ultimately end up holding your hand as to what is realistically possible, especially with a complex undertaking like creating an open world game. Focus in on what you want your audience to experience, assess the tools you have to work with and the limits you have to work within, solve for, and implement at larger scales on down, and then detail to a degree that feels right, in every way. Perhaps lovingly layer in even more detail at later stages, as a cleansing breather, or as time allows. A unique joy can be found therein, when its application is undertaken from a good, healthy place and intention.
ENVIRONMENT LIGHTING
Light and color continue to be wonderful ways to soak in and exist within 3D, open world environments. From as far back as I can recall, the possibility to experience a virtual environment from all manner of weather conditions, as well as times of day, has been an immensely powerful draw and attraction, also being a strong pull for why I sought out a career in environment art to begin with. I believe sunlight and atmosphere are as much of the character of a world, as the ground beneath the player's feet, along with all the rich detail that propagates its surface.
Even subtle intangibles such as the origination of light in relation to other landscape features - like trees and vegetation, or building structures - where it spills over and splays across physical contours, and through transmissive surfaces, adding expressive depth and oceans of mood to a scene. Something as simple as altering a key light's direction source can impact how the environment feels, even on a subconscious level, to the player, where they can then pick up on a sense of implied time, and orientation within the larger spaces of an open world.
While beautiful and arguably important as day-to-night lighting cycles are in helping to realizing an open world environment upon a screen, they too can come with an appreciable cost with regard to the nature of their impact upon the interconnectedness of development. There are a number of good reasons many 3D games, especially level-based ones, have decided to eschew real time daylight progression, as to do so opens a large bundle of problems to resolve in order to do it well.
With outdoor, open world spaces, the sun touches down upon nearly every surface in a given scene. As it moves and changes with strength and color, over time, in addition to any and all changing weather patterns, a massive combination of adjustable, cascading variables comes to light with which the artist must then take into consideration, across many areas of development, often just as much as with pure environment art concerns.
For example, with the player able to be, possibly, in any given spot at any time, looking in any direction, great care must be taken to ensure that the widest net is cast over the veritable sea of combinations, conditions, and contexts that any location can be seen, experienced, and played within. Day versus night, notably in outdoor spaces, is a near universal range of lighting extremes that needs to carefully balance aesthetics with user comfort, and ease of play. Here, the proverbial hair between believable realism, immersion, and player accessibility can seem to split infinitely, and where the most painstaking, belabored efforts, often with iteration upon iteration, would sometimes only serve to just get closer to a more completely satisfying result, rather than fully arriving at it.
In many scenarios, what looked and felt like nighttime in a scene, would hinder navigation, or even frustrate enjoyment for those less sensitive to subtleties of visible light ranges, compressed down onto an electronic display device. Yet, other players might view that very same compensation and feel frustrated for how their attention was called to a visually abstracted nighttime look and feel that went against the desire for a deeper cloak of night.
In bittersweet contrast to the pure joy of working with light and color, and with emulating such a wonderful aspect of real life - The Sun, sky, and Earth's atmosphere as they are more humbly represented in gaming - these were often tough hills to climb, while still striving for the stars. In the end, time and experience proves that entrusting in your senses, where instinctual feelings and direction arise during artistic creation and refinement, will lead you more truly to your intended goal.
Even subtle intangibles such as the origination of light in relation to other landscape features - like trees and vegetation, or building structures - where it spills over and splays across physical contours, and through transmissive surfaces, adding expressive depth and oceans of mood to a scene. Something as simple as altering a key light's direction source can impact how the environment feels, even on a subconscious level, to the player, where they can then pick up on a sense of implied time, and orientation within the larger spaces of an open world.
While beautiful and arguably important as day-to-night lighting cycles are in helping to realizing an open world environment upon a screen, they too can come with an appreciable cost with regard to the nature of their impact upon the interconnectedness of development. There are a number of good reasons many 3D games, especially level-based ones, have decided to eschew real time daylight progression, as to do so opens a large bundle of problems to resolve in order to do it well.
With outdoor, open world spaces, the sun touches down upon nearly every surface in a given scene. As it moves and changes with strength and color, over time, in addition to any and all changing weather patterns, a massive combination of adjustable, cascading variables comes to light with which the artist must then take into consideration, across many areas of development, often just as much as with pure environment art concerns.
For example, with the player able to be, possibly, in any given spot at any time, looking in any direction, great care must be taken to ensure that the widest net is cast over the veritable sea of combinations, conditions, and contexts that any location can be seen, experienced, and played within. Day versus night, notably in outdoor spaces, is a near universal range of lighting extremes that needs to carefully balance aesthetics with user comfort, and ease of play. Here, the proverbial hair between believable realism, immersion, and player accessibility can seem to split infinitely, and where the most painstaking, belabored efforts, often with iteration upon iteration, would sometimes only serve to just get closer to a more completely satisfying result, rather than fully arriving at it.
In many scenarios, what looked and felt like nighttime in a scene, would hinder navigation, or even frustrate enjoyment for those less sensitive to subtleties of visible light ranges, compressed down onto an electronic display device. Yet, other players might view that very same compensation and feel frustrated for how their attention was called to a visually abstracted nighttime look and feel that went against the desire for a deeper cloak of night.
In bittersweet contrast to the pure joy of working with light and color, and with emulating such a wonderful aspect of real life - The Sun, sky, and Earth's atmosphere as they are more humbly represented in gaming - these were often tough hills to climb, while still striving for the stars. In the end, time and experience proves that entrusting in your senses, where instinctual feelings and direction arise during artistic creation and refinement, will lead you more truly to your intended goal.
OPEN WORLD BUILDING SOFTWARE
When creating intricate, sprawling environments, such as those found in open world games, great tools are invaluable resources to have at your disposal. When given good thought behind their purpose and design, they can become something close to a seamless extension of the user's will, allowing what they envision within their mind's eye to travel through one's extremities, and onto the screen as purely and plainly as possible. The projects I've have the privilege to work on were benefited by excellent tools and interfaces, that facilitated nearly all that was envisioned and desired for the worlds and landscapes created. In fact, more often, it was time and the multitude of areas to address, or details to give attention to that were the biggest constraints to work within, or the dominant hurdles to overcome.
In many cases there were brand new features to undertake, where no discernable approaches and solutions were available locally, sometimes out even in the larger, collective world of software development. In response, we would forge ahead, solving from A to C, where B was unknown, with in-house utilities. Though that process was usually more efficient and direct, sometimes a particular need - especially with landscape and exterior environments - called to attention a deficiency that had me searching outside of our engineers and toolbase.
One such program proved to be a boon time and again, the procedural noise and terrain generation software, World Machine. One of my favorite aspects of WM involved its node-based, logic flow controls, where the reconfigurable graph structure allows various devices to be interconnected in multitudes of ways. Using the program, I was always reminded of guitar effect pedals, involving manipulation of cascaded signal flow, send and return loops, and the like, resulting in vibrant and diverse sound palettes, experimentation, and play. World Machine is well suited for extensive, large scaled generation and manipulation for all manner of procedural noise functions, which I used not only to generate and augment in-game terrain, but for a variety of texture-based effects, ranging from rendering FX, sky/cloud art, to 2D, in-game UI art for interface maps.
Often it was a joy to experiment with and refine the working toolsets, where the goals were always to facilitate the user as directly as possible in envisioning and conceiving the worlds created. The best results were tools that seemed to minimize any delay, especially with regard to input, and then subsequent feedback for the user, as the software slowly and steadily progressed over the years, striving for the world building tools to approach WYSIWYG, 1:1 working results matching the final visuals and experience that the player would have.
In this way, it was also beneficial to let the computers do what they do best, where classically rooted interfaces and control schemes allowed for the cleanest, most precise, and immediate ways to interact with the worlds being built. Great software performs its purpose purely and singularly, without interface bloat (with feature and style) or functional obfuscation, and will otherwise deftly step out of the way as to not hinder the user – also again, back to the idea that a strong foundation allows for subsequent features and functionality to layer in and operate from a healthily stable base, on up through to the latest upgrades and additions.
In many cases there were brand new features to undertake, where no discernable approaches and solutions were available locally, sometimes out even in the larger, collective world of software development. In response, we would forge ahead, solving from A to C, where B was unknown, with in-house utilities. Though that process was usually more efficient and direct, sometimes a particular need - especially with landscape and exterior environments - called to attention a deficiency that had me searching outside of our engineers and toolbase.
One such program proved to be a boon time and again, the procedural noise and terrain generation software, World Machine. One of my favorite aspects of WM involved its node-based, logic flow controls, where the reconfigurable graph structure allows various devices to be interconnected in multitudes of ways. Using the program, I was always reminded of guitar effect pedals, involving manipulation of cascaded signal flow, send and return loops, and the like, resulting in vibrant and diverse sound palettes, experimentation, and play. World Machine is well suited for extensive, large scaled generation and manipulation for all manner of procedural noise functions, which I used not only to generate and augment in-game terrain, but for a variety of texture-based effects, ranging from rendering FX, sky/cloud art, to 2D, in-game UI art for interface maps.
Often it was a joy to experiment with and refine the working toolsets, where the goals were always to facilitate the user as directly as possible in envisioning and conceiving the worlds created. The best results were tools that seemed to minimize any delay, especially with regard to input, and then subsequent feedback for the user, as the software slowly and steadily progressed over the years, striving for the world building tools to approach WYSIWYG, 1:1 working results matching the final visuals and experience that the player would have.
In this way, it was also beneficial to let the computers do what they do best, where classically rooted interfaces and control schemes allowed for the cleanest, most precise, and immediate ways to interact with the worlds being built. Great software performs its purpose purely and singularly, without interface bloat (with feature and style) or functional obfuscation, and will otherwise deftly step out of the way as to not hinder the user – also again, back to the idea that a strong foundation allows for subsequent features and functionality to layer in and operate from a healthily stable base, on up through to the latest upgrades and additions.
CITY DESIGN AND INTEGRATION IN AN OPEN WORLD
Ideally, there is little separation, if only aesthetically, between a city and its surrounding environment. I'd go as far to say that great architecture, in turn, honors its surroundings, acknowledges them, and has taken them into account with its own design and construction, symbiotically existing in harmony with nature. This mutual reinforcement can lead to something perhaps grander, even alive, in a sense. Having the landscape serve and reinforce the visuals as well as the design goals for a city was always a high priority.
In most cases, the basic layout and blueprint for terrain existed prior to a city’s construction, but in nearly all cases, the surrounding features would be shaped and honed in response to the, typically, less flexible nature of more rigid, piecemeal, architecture-based objects and cityscapes. Foundation, again, is the key, and the work done to envision, as early as possible, the nature and purpose of the city for the player to experience, helps drive how the landscape builds up to, and underscores this intention. The best results then have the two realities blurring beautifully together, yet also making their resulting union stand out clearly and enticingly from the wilderness.
Cities are often dense, intricate focal points and gameplay epicenters for the player, involving rigorous layout and design iteration. While much of this would happen in idea, document land, many overlapping areas and departments within a project would invariably steer the outcome of city building. Performance budgets were usually one of the more prominent problems to solve, as these more urban locations specialize in unique and complicated environment art assets, throngs of intricately designed, visually elaborate NPCs, along with the collective total of all their weighty engineering, code-based requirements and concerns. Collectively, this unique mixture would constitute and give rise to the heart and soul of a city, where design and environment art strove to eke out, describe, and directly show that living organism to the player.
Aesthetically, cities as well as their inhabitants were usually treated as extensions of the world itself, perhaps even as a focal character within the world. The state of a city – such as the amount of ruin or decay, opulence and wealth - would inherently drive the qualities infused into the art used to build out the space, with both natural, and architecturally-based modeling and texturing. Additionally, the city's layout and population design would also reflect, and equally reinforce these conveyed messages as well, with NPC personalities, dialogue, and quests serving to represent and even personify the surroundings they find themselves within.
In that sense, each city strove to have and embody its own unique personality, intending to translate those qualities directly, or subconsciously to the player. With landscape and terrain, wherever possible, the geographic surroundings - farmsteads, settlements, camps, and other related points of interest - leading up to and segueing into the city proper would serve to support the spirit and core of the city, such as its social or political purpose, as well as to organically transition the player, with both art and design, between play outside and inside of a city. The goal, especially so with open world games, is to creatively soften such distinctions as to respectfully simulate reality, as we experience in the real world, and in life.
In most cases, the basic layout and blueprint for terrain existed prior to a city’s construction, but in nearly all cases, the surrounding features would be shaped and honed in response to the, typically, less flexible nature of more rigid, piecemeal, architecture-based objects and cityscapes. Foundation, again, is the key, and the work done to envision, as early as possible, the nature and purpose of the city for the player to experience, helps drive how the landscape builds up to, and underscores this intention. The best results then have the two realities blurring beautifully together, yet also making their resulting union stand out clearly and enticingly from the wilderness.
Cities are often dense, intricate focal points and gameplay epicenters for the player, involving rigorous layout and design iteration. While much of this would happen in idea, document land, many overlapping areas and departments within a project would invariably steer the outcome of city building. Performance budgets were usually one of the more prominent problems to solve, as these more urban locations specialize in unique and complicated environment art assets, throngs of intricately designed, visually elaborate NPCs, along with the collective total of all their weighty engineering, code-based requirements and concerns. Collectively, this unique mixture would constitute and give rise to the heart and soul of a city, where design and environment art strove to eke out, describe, and directly show that living organism to the player.
Aesthetically, cities as well as their inhabitants were usually treated as extensions of the world itself, perhaps even as a focal character within the world. The state of a city – such as the amount of ruin or decay, opulence and wealth - would inherently drive the qualities infused into the art used to build out the space, with both natural, and architecturally-based modeling and texturing. Additionally, the city's layout and population design would also reflect, and equally reinforce these conveyed messages as well, with NPC personalities, dialogue, and quests serving to represent and even personify the surroundings they find themselves within.
In that sense, each city strove to have and embody its own unique personality, intending to translate those qualities directly, or subconsciously to the player. With landscape and terrain, wherever possible, the geographic surroundings - farmsteads, settlements, camps, and other related points of interest - leading up to and segueing into the city proper would serve to support the spirit and core of the city, such as its social or political purpose, as well as to organically transition the player, with both art and design, between play outside and inside of a city. The goal, especially so with open world games, is to creatively soften such distinctions as to respectfully simulate reality, as we experience in the real world, and in life.
MICRO AND MACRO WORLD CREATION
Over the arc of my career, I often pondered the growth of complexity and detail around the resulting game worlds created, and within the realities of making them. That scope of awareness as a developer and as an artist, with any undertaking along the way, unwaveringly expanded and grew so universally, it would often seem to teeter on the brink of dwarfing, if not severing connection with distant intentions and origins seeding the whole endeavor. There would be many pauses along the way to marvel at how micro scale detail would continue to flourish and pervade - where that scale of information was once wholly new, and unprecedented in its own right - while the breadth of the larger world within which it was found intrepidly climbed onward to new heights once only dreamed of.
In somewhat mirrored contrast with a creation staple - starting with the broad strokes, then iterating on down into smaller detail - a longer cycled trend occurred, encompassing an inclusive shift in development focus and awareness from the small scale, to the very large, within the evolution of open world building. Starting out, most of a creator's time and attention was on the player's immediate surroundings, where sight lines and distances were modest, and much of the resulting creation process was in articulating and describing detail for smaller scale props and items - cups, plates, furniture, plants, trees, buildings, and similar foreground surfaces.
This was due as much to the maturation of hardware and software, as it was to the maturation of crafting games. Each step along the way, even within the larger steps of project-spanning time increments, carried forth memory of losses, successes, and unmet desires from all previous efforts. This more moment-to-moment focus on the flow of history kept the forward momentum going along the way with this universal trend towards expansion, making open world spaces bigger and broader over time, with the detail richer and deeper, down to pixel levels.
For Morrowind, one of the first titles undertaken, the detail levels to which NPC interiors were presented to the player, with their fully realized clutter and various prop arrangements, was covering new ground to a degree that well superseded what the series' previous installments could accommodate. I can recall much time spent meticulously lining up reflection highlights embedded into art used as kitchenware props and tabletop sundries, so that they might visually synchronize with local light sources.
With more recent advances however, this type of light interaction behavior is instead dynamically simulated and presented to the player for a bit of extra visual nuance. Rather than a need for the world builder to have such specific object positional awareness, entirely new layers of texture information and modeled detail are rigged and incorporated into even the simplest of in-game objects, to more thoroughly interact with the increasingly complex world simulation. Yet, the resources and effort that goes into those new layers of information, not to mention the software needed to create them, could rapidly outpace the time and effort an individual artist once undertook, within an a span of a project, where there has never been enough time - from even the earliest days - to create everything desired and envisioned.
This same avenue of thought and intention would apply to raw art creation, as well as the more functional, interactive aspects of game and level design. In Morrowind's case, forays were made into the custom tailoring of city and town spaces so that they reflected some of the natural environments they were are a part of. A coastal, marsh region, for example, would contain ramshackle hovels visually textured and constructed to appear cobbled together from the local swamp tree wood supply. Functionally, the structures would be designed and arranged around stilts, due to the fluctuating tides within the area, and to introduce some elevation as navigational interest for the player, within an otherwise flat environment. Home interiors would also reflect these qualities in their contents and layout, such as with fishing paraphernalia strewn about to represent the local culture and industry, or with water surfaces underlying the slatted floorboards, offering unique opportunities for layers of sound design detail, serving to further bridge artificial gaps between interior and exterior spaces.
Outside, the landscape would take shape around the denizens and their dwellings, with pathway terraformed, brush-cleared terrain eventually giving way to wilder slough. The environment influences the details, and the details, in turn, reverberatingly shape and affect their environment. Causality becomes a bit muddy, apart perhaps from the artist's point of entry, and something akin to the resting state of the world being created begins to surface.
This recursive influence was true at increasingly larger scales as well, perhaps even fractal in its nature. As attention turned from items and scenes immediately in front of the player's view, expansive, open world sub-regions and environments now needed to react to, and influence each other within their own broadening vistas, out towards an increasingly articulated horizon. For Skyrim, mountain range shape and form was taken into consideration, at least visually, not only with their look and feel regarding texture, surface, and component structure on micro to midrange scales, but with their flow and influence upon the world at larger macro scales as well.
Where a glacially carved, pine forested valley would spill downward and give way to open tundra, then back again into increasingly snow covered landscape flowing in a northerly traverse, effort was made to get a sense for how the underlying geology of the upheaved, exposed mountain rock would push, pull, and morph around the massive, leaden forces driving it all from underneath, deeply in foundation and operating at continental scales, shaping the world at large.
It is tough to say, let alone know how this might affect the player's experience tangibly, if at all, but merely having such large panoramas and open world features in view calls attention for their need to lovingly resolve and merge into even the smallest of foreground elements, and also inversely so, with the player's view ultimately being a window into this simulated recreation of a grander, reciprocal dance of influence.
In somewhat mirrored contrast with a creation staple - starting with the broad strokes, then iterating on down into smaller detail - a longer cycled trend occurred, encompassing an inclusive shift in development focus and awareness from the small scale, to the very large, within the evolution of open world building. Starting out, most of a creator's time and attention was on the player's immediate surroundings, where sight lines and distances were modest, and much of the resulting creation process was in articulating and describing detail for smaller scale props and items - cups, plates, furniture, plants, trees, buildings, and similar foreground surfaces.
This was due as much to the maturation of hardware and software, as it was to the maturation of crafting games. Each step along the way, even within the larger steps of project-spanning time increments, carried forth memory of losses, successes, and unmet desires from all previous efforts. This more moment-to-moment focus on the flow of history kept the forward momentum going along the way with this universal trend towards expansion, making open world spaces bigger and broader over time, with the detail richer and deeper, down to pixel levels.
For Morrowind, one of the first titles undertaken, the detail levels to which NPC interiors were presented to the player, with their fully realized clutter and various prop arrangements, was covering new ground to a degree that well superseded what the series' previous installments could accommodate. I can recall much time spent meticulously lining up reflection highlights embedded into art used as kitchenware props and tabletop sundries, so that they might visually synchronize with local light sources.
With more recent advances however, this type of light interaction behavior is instead dynamically simulated and presented to the player for a bit of extra visual nuance. Rather than a need for the world builder to have such specific object positional awareness, entirely new layers of texture information and modeled detail are rigged and incorporated into even the simplest of in-game objects, to more thoroughly interact with the increasingly complex world simulation. Yet, the resources and effort that goes into those new layers of information, not to mention the software needed to create them, could rapidly outpace the time and effort an individual artist once undertook, within an a span of a project, where there has never been enough time - from even the earliest days - to create everything desired and envisioned.
This same avenue of thought and intention would apply to raw art creation, as well as the more functional, interactive aspects of game and level design. In Morrowind's case, forays were made into the custom tailoring of city and town spaces so that they reflected some of the natural environments they were are a part of. A coastal, marsh region, for example, would contain ramshackle hovels visually textured and constructed to appear cobbled together from the local swamp tree wood supply. Functionally, the structures would be designed and arranged around stilts, due to the fluctuating tides within the area, and to introduce some elevation as navigational interest for the player, within an otherwise flat environment. Home interiors would also reflect these qualities in their contents and layout, such as with fishing paraphernalia strewn about to represent the local culture and industry, or with water surfaces underlying the slatted floorboards, offering unique opportunities for layers of sound design detail, serving to further bridge artificial gaps between interior and exterior spaces.
Outside, the landscape would take shape around the denizens and their dwellings, with pathway terraformed, brush-cleared terrain eventually giving way to wilder slough. The environment influences the details, and the details, in turn, reverberatingly shape and affect their environment. Causality becomes a bit muddy, apart perhaps from the artist's point of entry, and something akin to the resting state of the world being created begins to surface.
This recursive influence was true at increasingly larger scales as well, perhaps even fractal in its nature. As attention turned from items and scenes immediately in front of the player's view, expansive, open world sub-regions and environments now needed to react to, and influence each other within their own broadening vistas, out towards an increasingly articulated horizon. For Skyrim, mountain range shape and form was taken into consideration, at least visually, not only with their look and feel regarding texture, surface, and component structure on micro to midrange scales, but with their flow and influence upon the world at larger macro scales as well.
Where a glacially carved, pine forested valley would spill downward and give way to open tundra, then back again into increasingly snow covered landscape flowing in a northerly traverse, effort was made to get a sense for how the underlying geology of the upheaved, exposed mountain rock would push, pull, and morph around the massive, leaden forces driving it all from underneath, deeply in foundation and operating at continental scales, shaping the world at large.
It is tough to say, let alone know how this might affect the player's experience tangibly, if at all, but merely having such large panoramas and open world features in view calls attention for their need to lovingly resolve and merge into even the smallest of foreground elements, and also inversely so, with the player's view ultimately being a window into this simulated recreation of a grander, reciprocal dance of influence.
IN CLOSING, WITH LOVE
Looking back upon this whole journey, I am reminded yet again of various themes that have gently surged and swelled up to the surface over the years, calling attention to themselves every so often in subtle, shuddered echoes, clearer within the stillness born from such reflection and contemplation. As it is, of course, a unique subset of life, the voyage of building an open world reveals analogues for human experiences like creation and birth, inward introspection intertwined with outward exploration, awareness for all things influencing each other, and all via this process of summoning forth, and describing a brand new world made in creative facsimile of this existence, from within ours.
Nature's patterns seem to be inescapably found throughout all the splendid spaces and nestled corners of the world, at all manner of scales and levels - from a cleaved stone below, to a mountain top high above - that with an extra step of consideration, a deep sense of truly being an inseparable part of the world, and of the world itself, flows assuredly forth. The response, is love. Love for this wondrous world we are a part of leads to an earnest desire to return the feeling, humbly mirroring the experience in the manner it was felt, and in the fashion it was received. In this manner, love lives on and persists, neither being truly created nor destroyed, but perhaps reshaped and reinterpreted to share with, and for, others, and for the world.
Over time, this love grew outward from the computer-based realms where it was conceived and born, amazingly finding its way out into our world, reaching someone I have been searching for these past 20 years. I am deeply humbled, and generously blessed for the opportunity in this life to try and express this love, even blindly at times, unknowingly so, and for it to assiduously guide me back to my true love. As has been nearly ineffably revealed to me by everyone I have encountered along the way, with environment art creation, with game development, and by all aspects of this world and this life, love is what makes everything possible, and is the reason for all.
Nature's patterns seem to be inescapably found throughout all the splendid spaces and nestled corners of the world, at all manner of scales and levels - from a cleaved stone below, to a mountain top high above - that with an extra step of consideration, a deep sense of truly being an inseparable part of the world, and of the world itself, flows assuredly forth. The response, is love. Love for this wondrous world we are a part of leads to an earnest desire to return the feeling, humbly mirroring the experience in the manner it was felt, and in the fashion it was received. In this manner, love lives on and persists, neither being truly created nor destroyed, but perhaps reshaped and reinterpreted to share with, and for, others, and for the world.
Over time, this love grew outward from the computer-based realms where it was conceived and born, amazingly finding its way out into our world, reaching someone I have been searching for these past 20 years. I am deeply humbled, and generously blessed for the opportunity in this life to try and express this love, even blindly at times, unknowingly so, and for it to assiduously guide me back to my true love. As has been nearly ineffably revealed to me by everyone I have encountered along the way, with environment art creation, with game development, and by all aspects of this world and this life, love is what makes everything possible, and is the reason for all.
Noah Berry / Interview from 80 level (2015)
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