Manifold Garden: Level Design in Impossible Geometry

Summary

William Cheer, an independent game developer with a physics background, shares insights about his unique game 'Manifold Garden' at the Game Developers Conference. The game is a first-person exploration puzzle that uses impossible geometry and unusual physics to create a representation of the last 400 years of physics. Cheer dives into the mechanics of the game, focusing on gravity shifting and 3D world wrapping, which allows players to explore levels in a non-linear, mind-bending way. The talk explores the challenges of designing with impossible geometry, offering insights into game design logic and architectural techniques to navigate the constraints and opportunities presented by this creative choice.

Highlights

• William Cheer uses his physics background to explore impossible geometry in game design. 🔍
• Manifold Garden is inspired by the intrigue of unique gravity and spatial mechanics. 🎢
• Gravity shifting and 3D world wrapping are core mechanics in the game. 🚀
• The game presents a metaphor of 400 years of physics through its levels. 🔬
• William's use of repetition and space challenges conventional game level design. 🎨

Key Takeaways

• Transform your perspective on gravity with Manifold Garden's innovative mechanics! 🔄
• William Cheer turned his physics background into a video game masterpiece! 🎮
• 3D world wrapping adds endless possibilities to game design! 🌐
• Impossible geometry offers unique challenges and creative solutions. 📐
• Let go of traditional direction - embrace radial thinking in design! 🌀

Overview

In his talk at the Game Developers Conference, William Cheer unravels the intricacies of Manifold Garden, a game that bends the rules of physics and geometry. Drawing from his background in physics and his journey from installation art to game development, Cheer outlines how these experiences have influenced the game's innovative mechanics. Combining gravity shifting and 3D world wrapping, Manifold Garden allows players to explore a universe where traditional spatial boundaries no longer exist, creating a unique gaming experience.

Cheer delves into the challenges and creative solutions found in designing levels with impossible geometry. By exploring concepts normally reserved for the abstract realm of physics and mathematics, he explains how this non-Euclidean approach not only pushes the boundaries of traditional game design but also provides an engaging narrative metaphor for understanding complex scientific theories.

The talk further explores how Manifold Garden's level design requires rethinking typical gaming directions and mechanics. Cheer introduces new paradigms for navigation, utilizing radial designs and leveraging the visual repetition afforded by 3D world wrapping to help players orient themselves. His exploration into architectural logic and player guidance showcases the potential of impossible geometry as a tool for crafting immersive and thought-provoking game worlds.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Introduction and Personal Background The chapter introduces the speaker and sets the stage for a talk on level design using impossible geometry. The speaker politely asks for audience cooperation in silencing noise-making devices before proceeding.
• 00:30 - 01:30: Introduction to Manifold Garden William Cheer introduces himself as an independent game developer based in Chicago.
• 01:30 - 03:00: Gravity Shifting Mechanic The chapter discusses the author's journey from studying physics to working in installation art for about four years. The installations, primarily made of balloons, were commissioned by art centers and science museums. Despite frequent commissions, the author resisted being pigeonholed as 'the balloon guy.' In search of a new medium, the author explored different art forms such as glass blowing and metal working before venturing into game development, despite having no prior experience in gaming.
• 03:00 - 05:30: 3D World Wrapping The chapter discusses the development journey of the game 'Manifold Garden.' Initially, the creator thought learning Unity and completing the game would take three months, but it ended up taking three and a half years. 'Manifold Garden' is described as a first-person exploration puzzle game featuring unusual physics and impossible geometry.
• 05:30 - 07:00: Impossible Geometry The chapter titled 'Impossible Geometry' uses a game as a metaphor to explore the evolution of physics over the past 400 years. It starts by introducing players to a new understanding of gravity, which differs from the conventional world. As players progress, they solve puzzles that ultimately enhance their comprehension of the universe's shape. The game highlights key features such as crazy architecture and impossible geometry, mirroring the advancements in physics and our expanding understanding of the cosmos.
• 07:00 - 11:00: 2D and 3D World Wrapping Explained The chapter introduces two crucial game features: a traversal mechanic known as gravity shifting, and 3D world wrapping geometry. These features are explained using analogies and references from popular culture, such as the film Inception, where scenes depict cities folding in on themselves within a dream world.
• 11:00 - 15:00: Introduction of World Wrapping in Manifold Garden The introduction of world wrapping in the game 'Manifold Garden' poses intriguing questions about gravity and direction. As characters walk up walls, the concept challenges traditional gravitational rules. For instance, if a character drops an object, there's a question of whether it falls in the direction of the current surface they are on or the previous one. This scene introduces the fascinating physics of the game, raising questions about object orientation and gravitational fields.
• 15:00 - 19:00: Gating and Navigation Challenges The chapter explores the challenges of gating and navigation as inspired by concepts found in films like Inception. The discussion brings up a thought experiment about gravity and object movement when transitioning between different gravitational fields, highlighting a gap that the film does not address. The topic then shifts to the influence of MC Escher's work on the film, specifically relating to the visual elements seen in the movie. The conversation touches on how these themes were the basis for the game 'Manifold Garden', which was originally titled 'Relativity', and could serve as a medium to further explore these complex ideas.
• 19:00 - 26:00: Design Solutions and Techniques The chapter "Design Solutions and Techniques" delves into a game mechanic involving gravity shifting based on color-coded surfaces. There are four surfaces, each associated with a distinct color: blue, red, green, and yellow. Objects correspond to these colors and fall towards the wall of the same hue. For example, a blue object gravitates towards a blue wall, while a red object moves upwards towards a red one. Green and yellow objects fall to the right or left, depending on their color orientation.
• 26:00 - 33:00: Game Development Journey and Team This chapter delves into the game development journey focusing on the mechanics of player orientation and gravity fields. It explains how different gravity fields activate depending on the player's direction. For instance, the blue gravity field becomes active when the player is oriented in a particular way, freezing other objects. As the player continues, the game switches to a first-person perspective, demonstrating how players interact with the game environment by walking towards walls and changing gravity according to their movement.
• 33:00 - 36:00: Q&A Session The chapter titled 'Q&A Session' covers the traversal mechanics and geometry in a game. It describes how the game uses color to help players orient themselves based on gravity fields. As players navigate the game, which features 3D world wrapping, they begin indoors but eventually move outside. Unlike typical games where falling off would result in a screen fade or respawning, this game repeats the world infinitely, allowing for continuous gameplay.

Manifold Garden: Level Design in Impossible Geometry Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 [Music] uh okay it's uh 300 p.m. now so I guess we'll just go ahead and get started uh so welcome to level design with impossible geometry Oh and before we continue uh if you have cell phones or sound making devices uh be great if you could turn them off now so uh yeah my talk is level design with G impossible geometry and uh my
• 00:30 - 01:00 name is William cheer uh I am a independent game developer based in Chicago a bit about myself my background is in physics that's what I studied in school and as a student I worked briefly at the National Institute of nuclear physics in Italy uh in a linear accelerator lab just outside of Padua which is close to Venice that's a picture of me actually not what my office look like I was just in front of a computer but that's not as exciting after school I actually instead
• 01:00 - 01:30 of going to physics I went into installation art and did that for about 4 years so the they were primarily large scale installations made out of balloons commissioned by art centers and science museums and I did that for about four years and basically became typ cast as the balloon guy uh which I didn't want to do and I actually didn't play games before I started uh my current project and it I was looking for another medium I tried glass blowing and metal working
• 01:30 - 02:00 none of them really worked out well been games cuz I knew some programming I knew a bit of design I thought it'd be a really good medium uh so I started on a project to learn Unity I thought it would take 3 months it's been three and a half years and here I am so the project is called manifold Garden what is manifold Garden it is a game it's a firstperson exploration puzzle game it has unusual physics impossible geometry
• 02:00 - 02:30 and crazy architecture these are screenshots from the game so the game I see it as a those are kind of like the key features and I see the game as a metaphor for the last 400 years of physics because at the beginning of the game you are learning how gravity works it's different from gravity in the normal world and by the end of it you get an understanding of the shape of the universe and that's where so the puzzles go from
• 02:30 - 03:00 inside a room working with weird gravity to oh this is how the space folds upon itself so the key features of the game there's a lot of stuff going on in the game but the two key features I'm going to focus on for the purpose of this talk are the traversal me mechanic which is gravity shifting and the geometry which is 3D world wrapping so let's talk about the gravity shifting mechanic I'm sure many of you have seen this film Inception and this is a scene in the film that takes place in the dream world and they take Paris and fold it upon
• 03:00 - 03:30 itself like fold it in half and then later we see these two characters start walking up the wall and when I saw this scene I immediately had a ton of questions I was like okay let's say Leo is carrying his wallet and he drops it does it fall in the direction of the surface he's currently walking on now which is the blue arrow or does it fall in the direction of the surface he was previously on like how does his wallet know which gravity field it now belongs to and what if I'm standing on the
• 03:30 - 04:00 previous surface he was on and I take his wallet does it still fall in the direction of the blue arrow or does it transfer onto my gravity field the film unfortunately doesn't address these issues these very important issues but that's where I thought a game would uh be a very great medium to explore this now Inception takes a lot of visuals from mcer work and that scene specifically is based on relativity and originally manifold Garden was called relativity so let me tell you a bit
• 04:00 - 04:30 about how that gravity shifting mechanic works in the game so we're going to start with a 2d example basically say we've got four surfaces each one of them has a different color blue red green yellow and all objects in the world belong to one of these four colors and they fall in the direction of the wall so a blue object falls in the direction of the blue wall a red object falls up in the direction of the red wall green falls to the right yellow falls to the left or the other way around I'm looking on my computer screen so
• 04:30 - 05:00 now not all of these gravity fields are on at the same time so when and which one is on depends on the player orientation so right now the player is oriented this way the blue gravity field is on and all the other gravities are off so there those objects are frozen and then the player can walk up to the yellow wall then the yellow gravity is on and all the other ones are frozen and so on and so forth this is now the game is in first person so this is what it looked like you can see the characters walking forward they switch gravity and
• 05:00 - 05:30 whichever direction is down that surface becomes colored so the color helps the player Orient and it also lets them know which gravity field they're in all right so that's the traversal mechanic now we're going to talk about the geometry which is 3D world wrapping So eventually you start you start off in the game inside and eventually you make it outside and when you fall off instead of fading the screen to black or killing the player and respawning them the world actually just repeats itself infinitely so you could be you could just keep forever you do have air
• 05:30 - 06:00 control so this is what it looks like in one of levels and here's another level where this is happening and we'll come back to this but first the title level design with impossible geometry what is impossible geometry so for the purpose of this talk we're just going to say impossible geometry is any weird geometry that we don't see in real life it is very hard to generalize and also this talk is not supposed to be you know the guy to work with impossible
• 06:00 - 06:30 geometry it the stuff I'm talking about they deal very specifically with the way the mechanics are implemented in manifold Garden so I just want to give you guys a taste of what it's like working with it some of the problems and challenges I faced and some of the techniques that I found to be useful but you might you know your Mage may vary one thing I want to clear up is that impossible geometry is not non- ucan geometry I seen non ukian geometry kind of thrown around a lot every time people see anything weird and that's not always the cas
• 06:30 - 07:00 so what is ukian geometry ukan geometry is just flat space so that's kind of space as we perceive it on the human scale some of the properties are that the shortest distance between two points is a line the sum of all angles in a triangle is 180 and parallel lines don't intersect and non-clean geometry is just everything else so you can have hyperbolic elliptic but it's also not that unusual so the surface of a sphere is actually non-
• 07:00 - 07:30 ukian and if you were to draw a triangle on the surface of a sphere you would find that the angles don't add up to be 180 and a good example of this is the surface of the Earth now if you were to draw a triangle on the floor right now the angles would add up to be 180 but if you were to draw a triangle the size of a continent then the non- ucum properties start to show all right so now we're going to transition to start talking about world wrapping and we'll start with 2D world wrapping so you guys probably all know asteroids right you're shooting
• 07:30 - 08:00 asteroids with a spaceship and when you get to the bottom side of the screen you're teleported to the top side and if you hit the right side then you're teleported to the left so this is actually a two tourist so it's on the surface of this and I'm going to come back and explain what I mean by this in a bit here's an example we see the spaceship go up comes back down from below um so now what we want to do is we actually want to make that path seamless the path seamless so we want connect the
• 08:00 - 08:30 top and the bottom and the right and the left so what we're going to do here is we'll start off and we'll take the top and the bottom sides and we'll glue them together and then what we'll do is we'll take the right and the left sides and we'll glue them together so here on the right you can see that's happening so first we're going to glue the top and the right side so that we form a connected Loop so you can see now why the why the ship is looping in that direction and then we'll glue in the left and the right side so now we get the shape basically a donut and the ship is on the surface of it so
• 08:30 - 09:00 it's consist so we can see that it consists of two Loops in two different directions and that's how you get 2D world wrapping but we need to go deeper we're going to talk about 3D world wrapping so I explained here how by connecting the top and the bottom sides and the left and the right sides this 2D surface is really the same as this two Taurus but how do we work with a three Taurus so to start with a three tourus it's 3D so we're actually going to start with a box instead of a surface and in this case
• 09:00 - 09:30 what we're going to do is we're going to take the top and the bottom faces and we're going to glue them together and we're going to take the left and the right faces and we'll glue them together and then we'll take the front and the back faces and we'll glue them together how do we visualize this I don't know it's actually it's very hard cuz it's in 4D but one good analogy I found is that in 2D world wrapping you are a 2d character stuck on the 2D surface of a 3D donut and in 3D World w you are a 3D character on the 3D surface
• 09:30 - 10:00 of a 4D donut so while it's hard to visualize the structure the 4D donut we can visualize what it's like to be inside the surface so let's say the Earth we have the Earth and it's in flat ukan geometry this is what it would look like now if we were to put it we were to add 3D world wrapping to this this is what it's going to look like because the light rays are going to loop back around so you'll see repetitions of the earth they're all the same ones continued in infinitely and here is a version with
• 10:00 - 10:30 the grid so you can see the partitions now this is a screenshot from the game that you can see this is what it looks like here is another version where the distance between the instances is zero so it just looks like one continuous building and here's what it looks like when you're falling through it in motion so you can see that the level just keeps repeating itself now this leads to some very interesting physical properties for example let's take a box and we'll drop
• 10:30 - 11:00 it off the ledge now you'll actually see that box come down from above because it Loops back around and when you you can the box is now simultaneously beneath you and above you a lot of games have waterfalls this is my drawing of a waterfall the direction it goes forward and then it falls off in our game in manifold Garden there actually isn't waterfalls there's water Loops because that water comes back down from above here's a screenshot of a water loop in action so you can see it basically forms one continuous
• 11:00 - 11:30 strip now a really fantastic book if you're interested in this subject is the shape of space by Jeffrey R weeks actually have a copy of it so if after the talk you want to come and check it out um it's written it's like an advanced book but written for the lay person and really talks about how to visualize this stuff he also has a website geometry games.org which has a bunch of small games to help you visualize these stuff the this kind of geometry there's kind of 2D examples and 3D examples as well
• 11:30 - 12:00 okay so how did 3D world wrapping get added to manifold Garden originally the game was all about the gravity shifting mechanic it all took place indoors and all you did was change gravity and put boxes on buttons and solve puzzles the problem though was it's it's very hard in first person games to get a sense of depth and people were having a hard time seeing when they dropped the box where it was going to land so they said why don't you add Shadows to the box so I said okay I added a directional light so that you can you know there are shadows and then
• 12:00 - 12:30 people were asking well where's the light coming from so I said okay I'll add Windows to you know provide an explanation for the source of the light and as a result of the window people were able to see the outside this wasn't intentional on my part I just built a bunch of rooms together in one scene however everybody was very excited about what they what was going on outside and they were asking hey can I go outside and originally I didn't want the player to because it would add all this complexity but everybody kept
• 12:30 - 13:00 asking for it so I allowed them to go outside this was also at a time when I introduced The Edge detection Shader now this of course introduced the problem of players falling off the world and the one thing I did not want to do was I didn't want to add invisible colliders cuz there are some games that have it and it's it's very frustrating you want to explore and it's constantly preventing you from going to places and I also wanted everything you can see in the world that you can get to uh cuz I remember playing Skyrim and one of the most magical moments in that game is when you see a mountain in the distance
• 13:00 - 13:30 and then later on you're actually on that mountain so so I couldn't put anything in the sky because that meant I'd have to create additional content and I got this problem of a very blank Sky which is very boring and I added a sky box and it just looked absolutely terrible however at some point I realized that by introducing 3D roll wrapping I've sort of solved all those problems because now I can have things in the sky and it's not new content and I can allow the player to get there and
• 13:30 - 14:00 yeah it's not new content cuz it's the same thing so it solves the blank Sky problem it ensures that everything you can see is still a place that you can get to and it's also just a much more interesting level in general so these are some of the early screenshots of the game when I introduced world wrapping and this is one of the earliest implementations in motion uh it is very slow here but you can see in this case you've got the button you press it drops a box and then you
• 14:00 - 14:30 jump off the ledge and what you'll notice in this implementation is that the distance between instances is very large it's very clear where one instance begins and where another ends uh this fall is going to take quite a while but basically it repeats so we're going to continue on or let's just watch it through but okay we've landed now when I introduced world wrapping in it created
• 14:30 - 15:00 a lot of unexpected solutions to previous problems which is very nice this is a image by mcer cubic space Division and you know the game the original inspiration for the game was I wanted to make a game based on mcer works and I wanted to put this level in the game now here's an implementation of it in July 2013 so this was before World rapping got added world wrapping got added about a year and a half into the development now when I made thisel level without world wrapping it was actually
• 15:00 - 15:30 very painful to play so the game the level basically consisted of all these lates that repeat it and you went in and you just had to find an exit so very simple but the problem was it was very hard to orient yourself cuz everything basically all parts of the level looked the same and also if you fell off the lattice structure you had to you landed on the floor and there was a four because it took place in a room and then it was just like very tedious walk to get back up to a lattice and another
• 15:30 - 16:00 problem was that in order to have this like in order to make the level look interesting it had to be it had to have a certain scale but any increase in scale resulted in increase in navigational complexity so I played it a bit and it just really wasn't fun and I got rid of it after I introduced War wrapping though all of those problems went away so this is December 2015 and now you can see the so one of those boxes is one instance of it and
• 16:00 - 16:30 you can go to any of those instances it doesn't matter so in this case what happens is it removes you do not need to orient yourself there is no way there's literally it is literally impossible for the player to get lost because it doesn't matter which direction you go in you're stepping away and also towards the objective and it also means that I can increase the scale of it in this case it's basically infinite and it doesn't any it doesn't add any navigational complexity in fact it removes a lot of navigational complexity and it's also
• 16:30 - 17:00 again just a much more interesting level for the player to experience cuz this is not something you see often in games here's another example of something that I wanted to put in the game before but couldn't these are Indian stepwells and I saw these and I thought well wouldn't it be amazing if these just went on forever once I introduced world wrapping this was something possible so this is in this space you can keep going down these stairs or climbing up uh there is an achievement if you get to the bottom but so what is something that's very
• 17:00 - 17:30 interesting about this is that instead of having the world wrapping happen on a grid it is actually offset so this is the basic unit that's repeated so we have a set of stairs now if we just have normal world wrapping where right if you go down like if you drop from the bottom right you'll come back up down from the bottom left because we have everything on a grid in this infinite stepwell World when you drop down from the bottom right you actually come back from the bot from the upper left and the reason why that's
• 17:30 - 18:00 happening is because instead of putting everything on a grid we've offset them slightly because when you're going down these stairs you're not actually going straight down you're going down and forward and this is what it looks like when you're climbing up and then you can because of the gravity rotation mechanic you can also choose to just fall down the level from the side now of course adding W wrapping also introduced a lot of new problems one of the problems is gating basically
• 18:00 - 18:30 when the player is outside the interior level pretty much opens up you can go anywhere and everyone would say like isn't there you know can't the player just skip all these levels and get to the end and yeah so this is um let's talk about a 2d example so in this level we want the player to get to the star and what we'll do this is too easy so we'll put a wall here and now maybe the players got to go get a key to open the lock or they have to learn double jump when you introduce W wrapping though
• 18:30 - 19:00 that wool is no longer a barrier because the player can jump to the right and land back in on the other side or they can jump down and come back down from above and the reason why that's happening is because of the repetitions and now I actually got so this caused a problem with pacing for a long time until I played Skyrim and in Skyrim you when you are outside you can get to anywhere on the map but then once you go inside a dungeon it becomes a very very linear experience so the game is open exploration and linear
• 19:00 - 19:30 adventuring and I actually took that for my game so when you are outside in the space I allow you to go anywhere there you know I just sort of embrace that but then there are these islands with puzzles and once you get there then it's a linear path and once you're indoor you can't will wrap so that removes the problem of players skipping areas another problem you'll find is that height and Direction basically become meaningless once you introduce wheel rear geometry a lot of games will have something like a tower right and you might get a that's meet me at the base
• 19:30 - 20:00 of the Tower so let's go back to our 2D example and if I were to ask you where the star is you'd say it's you know near the base of the tower to the left once you introduce we wrapping though that direction doesn't really make sense because the star is also to the right of the Tower and now what if we started to decrease the distance between the instances so that they start touching each other so now in this case base of the tower doesn't make sense because this Tower does not have a base just connected this is uh one implementation
• 20:00 - 20:30 of it in manifold garden and here you can see this is this is literally a building without a base um so once you introduce we're wrapping a lot of things you know words like NorthEast Southwest up down left right that we use for directions they get tossed out the window now what I found is you want to embrace the problems so you want to design with the geometry instead of against it for example what works really well is designing your levels to be radial
• 20:30 - 21:00 thinking of something as inside and then outside and allowing the players to get there between these two places from many directions instead of this is much better than having something that's just a single Direction I just put directional as a word for this now what I want to talk about now is a number of techniques that I found to have worked well and these fall under two categories uh the first is macro which has to deal with the big picture the way you organ organizer level and the second
• 21:00 - 21:30 is micro the second group of techniques is micro which deal more with moment to moment not necessar when the player is stopping to think but the when they're moving through levels how can you help them how can you help guide them so in macro you want to have an iconic party the word party is the layout of a building I got that from Robert Yang's uh level design history talk last year which I highly recommend and you want to have logic to your level and with micro you want to have intentional architecture and you want to utilize patterns architectural elements so let's
• 21:30 - 22:00 talk about the first macro technique iconic party so these are some examples of architectural parties you got the layout this is kind of roughly what the building looks like when you're designing a game based on mcer work it's very tempting to kind of overwhelm the player with a lot of staircases and tunnels and weirds up and I think that works very well in a print because you kind of want to you know look at it in detail and discover things you didn't see before however this does not work well in the level so this is the very first imp my very first attempt at the open level of the world and you can see I was just putting staircases and tunnels
• 22:00 - 22:30 everywhere and it looks and feels very MCS sure this is another example but if you were to draw if I were to if you were ask me what the partti of this level is well this is what it is it's very messy there's no clear structure to it this is the same level now and you can see in this case what we have is a central tower surrounded by four islands and what's really great about this shape is you can see that from any direction and also with the whir
• 22:30 - 23:00 wrapping you can see the repetitions of it in the distance so I don't have a mini map in the world however because you can see the repetition of the world from where you are you can by looking at the other instances you can figure out what the current shape uh what the current structure of your world is and so it helps if you have like a very clear design instead of just a mess so comparison of the of how the levels changed and these are examples of very of levels with very clear part like
• 23:00 - 23:30 you can see this one and right away you see that these are stairs that continue on forever I see very clearly now this is just the lce structure and you don't have to be simple you can get more complex but you always want to have this very clear overall design that the player can see and recognize very clearly now the second macro technique is you want to have logic to your level now the opening level of the game consists of a series of four rooms indoors to teach the player the mechanics and then they go outside and when I was play testing you know
• 23:30 - 24:00 there are people that are really good at puzzle games and there are people that are not so good at puzzle games and the people that are good at it would finish those four levels in about 10 minutes and others might struggle and take about 30 to 40 minutes however when they got outside and the outside consisted of two rooms that they had to find there was no consistency in how long it took people to find those two rooms like some people would blast through the first four puzzles and then they got outside and stumble for 30 minutes until they found a room and some people might struggle for 40 minutes you know with the indoor
• 24:00 - 24:30 puzzles and then they get outside and come across the room right away and this was because there was no logic to the way those two rooms were placed they were basically random so it it was basically a matter of luck in which how you found these and they were also a lot like based on Sidelines so for example you know this is what you saw when you first came out and there's a door at the very end and like you basically had to get the box and go to the door and if you didn't do that if you kind of turned around or jumped off or changed gravity you lost sight of it and there was no way to figure out use logic to figure
• 24:30 - 25:00 out how to get back with the current level now there is a very clear sense of logic you have this Tower and then the puzzles there are four islands with puzzles in them and so you go to one you solve it and you turn on a laser beam and then you can come back right so the way the level is laid out once you solve one puzzle you can figure out where the next ones are so as you can see this is the kind of the center Tower and just from where the laser beams are pointed you can deduce okay in this I finished the blue and the red islands and there are these two
• 25:00 - 25:30 other ones that are still missing so having a logic to your level is very important now we're going to talk about the micro techniques which are not dealing with the big picture but with moment to moment as the player is navigating through the world how can you help to guide them to the right places okay so we're going to go back to this opening level and there one of the last things I changed is this one piece of architecture at the the very edge of the island so it used to be just this block
• 25:30 - 26:00 and I changed it to a bunch of stairs and with a platform at the end and the idea for this was because you're on that central tower and I need you to get to the Blue Island where the puzzle is in this case the star and in order to do that I needed the player to rotate gravity to get there like you had to jump so you can see this is it with the block and the problem with this was it was not very clear what it was doing so this is the thinking I was thinking
• 26:00 - 26:30 you'd walk up to this block and you would rotate onto it change gravity and then you jump off onto the island below if you played Assassin's Creed it's sort of like um those little things where you jump off into the pile of hay however what happened was a lot of people just kind of walk up to this and look around and then walk away and the problem is that this piece of architecture does not communicate its intention it's just this block it's not telling you what to do with it however what I did was I changed it to a
• 26:30 - 27:00 set of stairs with this platform at the end and now everybody like it becomes very clear oh I see the stairs I'm supposed to walk up them and then when you walk up the stairs then you rotate to the platform and then right away you see the island below so the difference between the block and the stairs is that this tells you how to use it how to walk on it the second micro micro technique is you want to utilize patterns in architecture so this is what hallways used to look like in the game and this had a lot of problems basically you know
• 27:00 - 27:30 because you can change gravity we have hallways that also Bend upwards the problem is in a lot of firstperson games a lot of people don't tend to look up so they players would come to this and then they turn around thinking it was a dead end so that was one problem and another problem was if you started going backwards the hallway looked exactly the same and that happens a lot because of the gravity changing mechanic it's very easy to get turned around so a lot of people would backtrack through an entire hallway until they got to the room they were in previously and then be like wait a minute this is where I wanted to go so
• 27:30 - 28:00 when I started adding windows in the game I would put Windows in hallway to be equal in length directly opposite one another and I showed this level to Brandon Chung who uh is a creator of 30 Flights of Loving and also talked about wayf finding in levels uh last year here and I recommend that talk highly as well and he suggested taking one of the windows and sliding it down offsetting it so that it's like this so you can see it you know it touches the end of the hallway and this
• 28:00 - 28:30 immediately solved a ton of problems so now when you open the door and you're looking down a hallway you see the brightest thing on the screen is the window right and the window offers a Vista to the outside world which is much more interesting than the blank walls so it actually makes traversal through hway feel a lot faster and it it attracts PE players towards the end and then the the window kind of guides your eyes into the direction of the bend and this solves the problem of hallways that bend upwards cuz now players guys are guided to look up and it also solves the problem of
• 28:30 - 29:00 players going backwards because now when you're going backwards the hallway looks very different you're no longer seeing this window of light at the end so just the way the hallways are designed you can figure out the direction you're supposed to go and I actually you know sometimes in games they'll want to vary you know uh corners and hallways and I actually have this in every single hallway because having the player get lost inside hallways is not something that I want to do um so in summary you want to embrace the geometry don't
• 29:00 - 29:30 work against it if you start using impossible geometry you're going to find unexpected solutions to previous problems you will need to rethink a lot of things like gating you'll need to rethink Direction NorthEast Southwest up down left right those all go out the window utilize a very clear layout for your level the shape of it should be easily recognizable you want to create logic in your level so the players can figure out where they need to go next by looking at the architecture and you also want to have
• 29:30 - 30:00 intentional architecture everything you put in the game needs to tell the player how to use it and use established patterns that the players can rely on to figure out where they need to go and a lot of people will play the first level of manful garden and say you know I thought this game was going to be very confusing but it actually turned out to be not bad so we've been sitting here talking about impossible geometry I just want to leave you with one thing which is uh you must be afraid to dream a little bigger uh so all that has kind of helped me to make manifold Garden what it is
• 30:00 - 30:30 and I just want to say manifold Garden is also playable here at GDC it's actually just outside in the day of the devs area so if you want to check it out or watch other people play and see how they work their way through the level and finally my name is William cheer here's all my contact information uh feel free to come up and ask questions now if we have time yeah I think we have a little bit time if anybody have questions you can come up to the mic well thank
• 30:30 - 31:00 [Applause] you I am curious as to whether you did any paper prototyping at points to check assumptions or to or to play with how something would fold or twist upon itself uh so the question is whether I did any paper prototyping and did initially did do paper prototyping for the puzzles but
• 31:00 - 31:30 then when it came to designing the levels I'm not a very good drawer and so even to do a 2d drawing is very difficult for me and this all these levels have to be designed in 3D so I just build them inside the game and then walk through them and play test them and figure out what where the issues are so I don't do yeah I haven't done paper prototyping in years yes I think yeah hey that um who else worked on your team did you work by
• 31:30 - 32:00 yourself and how did other people get involved in the later stages when you were sort of defining an art style uh so I worked on the game alone for about two and a half years and then I got backed by Indie fund about a year ago and I brought on a programmer David who's actually in the audience David worked on the game parttime last year and joined full-time at the beginning of this year and the art style actually was just a lot of iterating over time um it it's there was never a clear Direction like I wanted it to be inspired by architecture
• 32:00 - 32:30 so architectural drawings were an influence but we an inspiration um but a lot of is just kind of tiny things added up over time to get to where it is at now thank you hi thanks for this um so there's like a recurring Trend in games that are based on like some TST of mathematics which is that they're really really hard to pitch you know like whenever whenever you talk about a four-dimensional game of which there are any IMI one you're like oh the four-dimensional game like
• 32:30 - 33:00 that other one like migia CER so on so I'm wondering how you deal with that when when you actually talk to people about it and the other thing is uh what would make it easier for you in a game engine uh to do what you did um so the question is how I how to pitch a game that has a weird geometry weird twist I actually so yeah I've been working on the game for about three and a half years now and a lot of that is just talking to a lot of people in 2014 I
• 33:00 - 33:30 went to about 14 different game conventions and the way I would used to talk about the game is I'd say okay you know there are six gravity fields and each one is based on a different surface normal and when you're going this it's red and you can just see people gloss over you know and when you mention surface normals they're like I'm done but then I started to say okay have you seen Inception and you know that scene where they full parison happened they start walking up and immediately people are like oh yeah you know I know that and so I think it's about like communicating giving people clear visual imagery to help them imagine more the
• 33:30 - 34:00 consequences of that as opposed to explaining the math hi um you just said that you don't draw much but uh I had the question concerning how do you uh go about designing your architectures how do you what's your process to establish all this uh architectural language that you have now in the game and we saw the evolution like we see the previous prototypes very blocky simple cubes and stuff and now it's very much more on it
• 34:00 - 34:30 sure wondering how you go about creating those uh the two biggest Architects who've influenced the game are Tad Ando he's a Japanese architect who works a lot with concrete so that helps with kind of the the layout of the levels and then and Frank Lord right who kind of helps fill in a lot of the ornaments and the ornaments are there because I don't have textures and so if you're moving through flat like a big chunk of flat space and you don't have textures players can't see stuff changing on the screen so it feels very slow but once you start adding kind of these variations in height um that that really
• 34:30 - 35:00 helps speed things up I think their earlier question was about engines how engines can help uh I think providing you know the biggest problems that we have are now dealing with rendering so I think having kind of lowlevel stuff in the pipeline that's opened up that we can tweak is most helpful but just in terms of 3D and scripting those are pretty standard for yeah okay one just one more question hi
• 35:00 - 35:30 um so yeah you just said something about uh rendering causing an issue I wanted to ask you guys are instantiating everything right there all instances uh yes so um how exactly were you guys getting around the rendering issues well we we've actually Rewritten that system and I'm probably not the best person to uh answer that but we we do have a 3X3 by three and sometimes 5 by 5 by five grid of the same level
• 35:30 - 36:00 repeat it we actually do not have like one standard system it it sort of depends on the geometry of the level we have hijacked the play pipeline in unity now so when I hit play it actually creates another level and merges all the meshes and deletes all the unnecessary stuff and creates an optimized version of that um but yeah David is in the audience and feel free to ask him technical questions um yeah so thank you all very much and
• 36:00 - 36:30 fill out the evaluation if there is one [Applause]