Fallout 4's Modular Level Design

All right, everybody, we're going to get started here. The usual first few words, go ahead and move in towards the center if you haven't already.

Turn off any noise-making devices, cell phones, etc., confetti cannons, just leave them under your seat. And remember to fill out the surveys at the end.

That's a huge help to us, lets us know sort of how we did and its most honest and anonymous feedback we can get.

All right, so off to the races. So as you can see, this talk is about the module level design of Fallout 4. You're in the right place, hopefully.

And before we really get going, a word of caution. This talk has a lot of ground to cover. We're going to go fast. We are going to make slides available.

You can find those online after the fact. So don't worry too much about getting everything down on the screen.

Just try and keep up with us, and we'll get through this together.

OK, so modular kits, modular level design. When most people think of them, the first thing that comes to mind is a LEGO brick.

And the comparison makes sense. Legos are small objects that work together as part of a system

to create something original, which maybe exceeds the bounds of the original imagination or intentions of the creator of the brick itself.

In a game like Fallout 4, we might think of a structure like this, something made from a series of interconnecting pieces working together as part of a system to make something original

that the game developer or the player created outside of the original intent of the person who made the kit.

So what you might be expecting today is a Modular Kits 101, sort of a primer. And that is and isn't what we're doing here today.

This is actually the second time that Nate and I have talked to GDC about this specific topic. We were originally here in 2013 as part of the Level Design in a Day workshop.

Today we're going to recap some of that talk, but we're also going to focus primarily on new ideas and new concepts and lessons that we've learned since we were here last.

A couple of brief words about who we are. My friend here is Nate Perky-Pyle, and he's an environment artist at Bethesda Game Studios. My name's Joel, I'm a level designer.

Nate Nate and I have known each other for about 12 years, worked together on and off throughout that time. And between the two of us, we've worked on several games.

And of the games that we've worked on together, all but one of them made extensive use of a modular system for its level design environment art.

Which is just to say that, you know, we've been to this rodeo, we've had several projects in many years to try out different approaches, find things that work, screw other things up, and just sort of learn.

That's not to say that everything up here today comes from Nate and I ourselves. We

owe something to our colleagues in the industry who have also shared their thoughts, whether it's Lee Perry, Darius Kazemi, Derek Yu, who are also interested in systemic level design,

but also the entire team at Bethesda Game Studios. And not just the other level designers and the other environment artists who use this process most directly, but the studio as a whole.

Because Bethesda Game Studios is a place that has created an environment to cultivate this kind of workflow and allow it to grow over the space of time that we've been working there and before.

And I think it's important to have this kind of context in mind in this and really any GDC talk, because while it's on its face about a specific process or a specific technique that you can hopefully use and apply to your own work, it doesn't exist in a vacuum.

It comes from who we are as a studio, what our priorities are, our culture, as well as the priorities and the goals of the games that we hope to create with it.

So today we're going to endeavor not to just give you the how of some specific techniques, but also as much as possible the why, so you can understand our thinking and how we came to these processes and best understand how to apply them to your own situation.

So modular level design is something that's been around in games for a long time.

At Bethesda, all the way back at Daggerfall, modular kits were used to build procedurally generated levels.

Morrowind had this sort of standard kit approach where everything snaps together on a grid.

Joel and I worked together on Bloodrain 2, and that was that same kind of kit approach. And it was really obvious to the player that this was a kit.

was like north, south, east, west. Oblivion had the same kind of kits, but there was a lot more custom pieces for destruction and things like that, so it worked a bit better,

but you could still tell it was a kit. In Fallout 3, we had standard kits for most spaces,

but here we started to try a lot of new things, like directional kits that only snap together in a certain way, asymmetrical hallways.

Skyrim had standard kits as well, but we tried even more new things, like kits that only went in a single direction, so you could have really specific architecture.

or the cave kit where there was all these separate pillars and walls and things that could be mixed together by the level designer to really define the space and it wasn't just dictated by the artist.

But today we're going to cover Fallout 4 and how we allowed the level designers to have even more flexibility and a lot more visual variety.

So yeah, as promised, this is sort of the 101 section of the talk.

We're going to go over some fundamentals and again, I'm going to go kind of quickly through them. So when we start thinking about creating a kit, the first thing we want to decide and understand about the kit is its footprint.

Footprint is in essence the grid, the size of the pieces and the shape on which they're going to snap and tie with each other.

This is where the comparison to a Lego brick probably makes the most sense.

The design of a Lego brick is highly specific and that specificity is what permits it to work together as part of a system.