The Importance of Nothing: Using Negative Space in Level Design

As you all have probably come back from lunch and have a little bit of a food coma,

I wanted to re-engage your brains a little bit with some highly complicated math.

So as soon as you know the answer to the following problem, please feel free to yell it out as loud as you like. I want the people next door to hear.

This is hard. 12 minus 5. That's kind of pitiful, but a few people got 7.

All right, so that's good. So we'll step it up a little bit. Feel free to jump in here.

And this one, I need you to answer in the proper format. So we have three dots minus one dot equals?

Two dots. Very good. So people are awake. I like this. So bonus round. Answer in the correct format.

We have Roman numeral four minus Roman numeral four equals?

Zero, not, null, nothing. This seems like a simple concept, right? You either have something or you don't. Something is there or it's not.

But obviously I've misled you a bit here because there is no Roman numeral for zero.

At a purely philosophical level, this is an unsolvable problem.

And the greatest minds in history have been unable to resolve it because they couldn't agree on what nothing actually was.

If you take everything out of a box, you're left with a void. And that void is theoretically something. It has a name.

It conceptually exists. And in this way, nothing has become a thing.

And this idea of nothing as something is exactly what the Greek and Roman philosophers debated about endlessly.

Because if nothing is something, then it can be used as a tool.

And that's exactly what we do. Design is about simplicity. It's about reduction and clarity.

it's about the importance of nothing. So nothing is a tool that we use perhaps unconsciously all the time.

But if we could apply it purposefully, then it stands to reason that we could make our maps and our games better.

And as technology improves, we have the ability to add more and more to our games to make them indistinguishable from reality by highlighting every crack,

every pore on the face, every strand of hair, every piece of geometry.

But we often forget to pause and consider the advantages inherent to the simplicity and clarity of nothing.

And a few months ago, as we were sitting around the office, we had this discussion about level clarity,

and it kind of inspired me to go back and revisit some of the basic design principles to take some lessons from the past and see how we might carry them forward into the future.

Now, at Epic, we've been fortunate enough to have had some successful games.

And within those games, there's one map that really stands out is what is quite possibly our most popular map of all time, and that is Facing Worlds.

Facing Worlds, or just CTF Face as it's commonly known, was a masterpiece of simplicity.

It stands out to me as representative of a generation of design techniques that we're kind of starting to stray from.

It has a really clean use of space, visual clarity, and flow,

and it's all due in large part to its great use of applied nothingness by way of negative space.

Now, the popularity of Facing Worlds is impressive and humbling, really.

If you Google Facing Worlds, you'll get over 37 million hits.

And I've seen copies, remakes, refactors, maps inspired by FACE by the hundreds, if not the thousands.

You'll see homebrew versions popping up in Worms, of all places.

Halo, StarCraft, Castle Wolfenstein, and TF2, Minecraft, any number of games that allow their players to mod and create.

As recently as last year, PC Gamer did a feature on the map calling it one of the best multiplayer maps ever.

Just this one fan page that I found randomly on the internet has over two dozen versions available for download.

I wonder how many of them were able to recapture that same simplicity and beauty.

How many of them tried to update the map without really realizing what made it work in the first place.

Because this is something that even we have struggled with in our own internal versions and official updates.

Face has been represented in multiple generations of Epyx games across multiple versions of the Unreal Engine.

So we can track how those techniques changed and get a clear understanding of the impact that had on the history of the map as it evolved.

So what did make it work? To a large degree, I'm saying it was negative space.

Now, technically speaking, negative space is the space where things aren't present, or the space between objects.

And negative space has been used for millennia. It's found both in Aboriginal and Paleolithic cave art.