STEVE GAYNOR: Hi, I’m Steve Gaynor, I’m a level designer on BioShock 2. I started at 2K Marin about a year ago. I was one of the first level designers that they hired. I had worked down in Texas on an expansion pack for the first person shooter F.E.A.R. before this, and then I met some of the cool guys from Marin at GDC in 2008, and we got to talking, and I ended up joining the team.
ALEX MUNN: My name is Alex Munn, and I’ve been in environment art for quite a while. I started out at a small kids’ educational company, Knowledge Adventure, and then I moved on to Blizzard. I worked there for quite a while.
STEVE GAYNOR: On Diablo 2.
ALEX MUNN: On Diablo 2.
STEVE GAYNOR: A totally sweet game.
ALEX MUNN: Thank you. And then onto Storm Front, and finally last summer I ended up at 2K Marin.
ELIZABETH TOBEY: That’s Steve and Alex, and they are the level design team making the fourth level of BioShock 2. Even from their introductions, I could tell these guys had quite the rapport with one another – comfortable enough to even finish each other’s sentences. And that was one of the most beautiful things about how 2K Marin develops games, and the relationship I was here to explore. I wanted to understand more about the unique way they pair designers and artists together to make a realistic and immersive level.
STEVE GAYNOR: I’m the level designer on one level in the game, which would be equivalent to take your pick from BioShock 1, like Arcadia or Fort Frolic. So, I’m the level designer and Alex is the level architect. In our terminology it basically means that Alex is in charge of how the place looks and how it’s shaped and what it is, and I’m primarily in charge of what happens there. You know, where guys are, what events happen, who you meet, and what objectives you have, all that kind of stuff.
ALEX MUNN: Yeah, level architect is a new term, I guess, but it’s a close cousin of the environment artist. It involves a lot of organizing, and from the start, conceptualizing: figuring out what look and feel of the location is, all the way through all the production. Figure out how the assets are going to get modeled, whether it’s making them myself or working with the modeling team, through lighting and performance, tuning, all that kind of stuff.
STEVE GAYNOR: Yeah, and we work together a lot, just because…you know, back in the day, one might say, not even too long ago, one person would be doing both of our jobs. When games were low enough fidelity that you could actually do that, and even within the extended work week of a normal game developer, actually create a game. One person deciding how the level looks and what happens there, but since that’s split out between two people, but those two halves of the experience still impact each other so much, there’s a lot of collaboration. I’m like, this needs to happen in this room, and how are going to get the proportions right, and get the layout right, and get the lighting and everything else about what the space is going to be to make the gameplay complement the space and the space complement the gameplay, back and forth.
ALEX MUNN: We’re collaborating from start to finish, and so the aesthetics and the gameplay are on equal footing, and balanced early on.
STEVE GAYNOR: Ideally.
ELIZABETH TOBEY: Many game companies today structure their teams such that the designers and artists work separately. I this structure a level designer would map out rooms of a level with grey boxes, and then hand that shell to an artist, who would decorate the space. The level would be passed between the two, but they would not work side by side, as Steve and Alex (and all the 2K Marin level teams) do today. However, it might not be obvious to an outside observer why a “level team” is so much different than two separate artists, so I asked for more details about how their process actually works, and why 2K Marin decided to use this structure rather than the more traditional, tried-and-true way.
ALEX MUNN: I think, well, for example, like take a hospital for example. You’re designing a hospital level. And potentially, you would get a really gameplay-y maze that happens to have hospital beds and wallpaper vs. we try to think of it more as a functional space and design around what would architecturally make sense. At the same time, obviously have good game mechanics and such, but I think we’re really thinking about the architectural space.
STEVE GAYNOR: Yeah, I imagine that the artist’s life is a lot harder in the situation where they just get a bunch of boxes that the game designer made, and then have to try and make it look good, because game designers, depending on who the individual is, may or may not have a great deal of experience or emphasis on the architecture of the place, and more thinking, “ok, the room should be this big, ok that’s fine, I’ll spawn some guys in it.” I think that we’re going to, I hope, the intent is to have a much more architecturally cohesive space all throughout the project, with our process, as opposed to “here’s some boxes,” and then the artist is like, “I can’t make this work,” and you have to do revision, and there’s complications later on, etc.
ALEX MUNN: I think it’s really important that we make it feel like a functional place, like people actually lived in this place, and it served a, before it was blown up and became a dystopia, it had a purpose and it served as a business or as a workspace or whatever, and it feels like you’re entering into a place where people have lived and existed.
ELIZABETH TOBEY: Just like my conversation with Jordan and Hoagy a few weeks ago, Alex and Steve again hit on one of the major building blocks of BioShock: The realistic nature of Rapture. One of the most praised aspects of BioShock was how alive the city was – that the spaces not only felt real, but that they had a history, that they had existed before the present state that you, the gamer, saw while playing through the levels.
STEVE GAYNOR: The nice thing about Rapture is that it is underwater, at the bottom of the sea. Everything had to be manmade to be fairly compact and probably laid out in a relatively arbitrary way. Like, ok, there are small buildings connected by tunnels, and everything. So there’s still a lot of play for a designer to say, “well, Rapture has its own sense of organization,” so we aren’t as beholden to the normal rules of a surface city or a building that you might be in right now, because Rapture works a little bit differently. But yeah, we still want to make it feel like the citizens of Rapture actually lived in this place even if it’s a little bit weirder than you’re probably used to.
ELIZABETH TOBEY: I still didn’t quite understand exactly how Steve and Alex interacted from day-to-day, and what their workflow actually looked like, so I asked them to dig a bit deeper and tell me more about their process. As I said before, the duo are in charge of BioShock 2’s fourth level, and as I didn’t want to spoil any part of the game for our listeners, I asked them to talk about a hypothetical level instead of what they were actually building.
STEVE GAYNOR: It’s the Circus Level. Spliced Clowns. You ever see a spliced clown? It’s weird. Get ready for it.
ELIZABETH TOBEY: Steve and Alex’s hypothetical level is derived from some old BioShock 2 plot rumors that flooded the internet just before the game was featured in Game Informer Magazine. While I appreciate their sense of humor, don’t get your hopes up – They’re talking only in hypotheticals, and their level does not, in fact, feature any spliced clowns, or anything else they talk about. We were here to talk about level design, and not spoil an actual level – but even in doing this, I saw how close Steve and Alex really were to one another, and what a good, and natural team they made.
STEVE GAYNOR: The nice thing is that we have art design collaboration from square one. So, everything starts on paper, and we essentially…a team like us gets a concept and some high level goals and themes, like from the creative director, lead level designer, saying, here’s generally what the place is, and the kind of experience, broadly, that we want the player to have in the arc of the whole game, now you guys come up with what kind of objectives that might translate into specifically, and draw a bunch of paper layouts of the place, what are some major locations, how are they going to be situated in relation to one another, what would the flow through the space be, and art and design are working hand in hand on from the concept phase. Then, as stuff goes through review, what do the leads think of it, how can we make it better, is this or that not going work conceptually, and then it starts to go into 3D in the editor and we start prototyping the gameplay.
ALEX MUNN: Yeah, and early on we figure out, ok, what are these locations, what are our major spots. Is this a circus tent or a robot factory or whatever…
STEVE GAYNOR: Right.
ALEX MUNN: And then on my side, I like to figure out what are the “postcard shots,” like what would be really cool to see out here? Do we want to have a wrecked ferris wheel, or an 80-foot robot that’s out of control crash through the floor or whatever? You know, dramatic or cinematic framed moments and then we figure out how to integrate that into the level. And of course the whole time we’re talking about what would happen there, what the gameplay beats are.
STEVE GAYNOR: Alex does a lot of really cool perspective concept art at that phase, where he’s sort of like, “ok, we came up with this location, and it’s the circus master’s private lounge. I’ll do a painting of that, and get an idea of what’s the tone, and some inspiration for what the final 3D assets you might end up building to populate it might be and all that kind of stuff.”
ALEX MUNN: A lot of the time it’s either design has a really cool mechanic they want to get across and we have to visually solve that, or design will riff off something that art comes up with, like oh, here’s this cool thing that looks really cool, how can we base some gameplay around that?
STEVE GAYNOR: Having more heads on the problem of the level, if you want to look at it as we’re solving all the problems that come up, is really useful. It is way better than having one person staring it down, and deciding, “ok, this is what we’re going to do,” and then handing it off. The more the people that can be throwing ideas at any point in the process, the better it’s going to come off, because you play off of each other’s brainstorming all throughout.
ALEX MUNN: And then occasionally, we’ll be in the middle of production, and he’ll be like, “hey, why don’t we do this?” And you’ll have a new fresh idea or experiment, we’ll just throw stuff in there and see what sticks, and it either sucks or it’s really cool, or whatever.
STEVE GAYNOR: Or it’s “good enough.”
ELIZABETH TOBEY: So where were they now in their design process, and what had they been up to all this time, designing secret Level Four?
STEVE GAYNOR: It started out as a fairly large space that had a bunch of individual wings to it.
ALEX MUNN: Early on, we extracted a whole wing from our level, and it got rolled off into a whole ‘nother level.
STEVE GAYNOR: Then also that means we’re going to have to fill in that missing space in our level with something that fits the theme and the objectives and all that kind of stuff.
ALEX MUNN: Yeah, but it’s very iterative too. We’ve done quite a bit of experimenting and trying things.
ELIZABETH TOBEY: Experimenting, and the iterative nature of the level teams, seemed the core of this design philosophy. I wanted to know more about that – how did two people, with such distinct tasks, work together to convey the overall theme of a level, and help progress the game’s story?
ALEX MUNN: I think sometimes the problem was we had too many ideas, and we’re trying to shoehorn fifty themes into a single level, and you have to pick, here are the two or three ideas we want to get across. There’s some primary theme stuff, and then some secondary areas, and that was a case where we had too much going on, and it was time to prune down a little.
STEVE GAYNOR: Which is nice, because then it ended up that some of those ideas got to live in their own separate space and become developed further as opposed to just being a little isolated thing that’s kind of crammed into where they first were.
ALEX MUNN: I think that becomes a problem, if every fifteen feet you start having some sort of new aesthetic or new theme the player has to digest, it can be pretty overwhelming.
STEVE GAYNOR:I think that was something. Evidence of doing it the right way was definitely clear in the first game. Just in the medical pavilion, there was a dentist’s office, or there were competing dentists’ offices, and there was a funeral parlor and all of these minor things, but it was held together by “this entire space is going to be made up of offices where doctors or health care people did business,” or Fort Frolic was “a mall,” and there was this kind of shop and that kind of gambling parlor, and this kind of nightclub there, but it was all held together by a single aesthetic, which there were only minor variations on in any given space. And so, having that kind of cohesion to a level is really important, and you can definitely start off with a gigantic cornucopia of ideas that you have to cut the ones or scale back the ones that don’t hang together with everything else.
ALEX MUNN: Aesthetically, when you take a level, you’re creating a set of textures and meshes that are for general use in that level, and then you’re creating subcategories like the dentist set and the funeral parlor set, and subtheming, but trying to keep a cohesive visual style, so it doesn’t jump all over the place.
ELIZABETH TOBEY: I don’t want to make it sound like everything was roses and puppy dogs for Alex and Steve. I asked them, point blank, if they’d ever butted heads over anything in their design process, and asked them to tell me the gruesome details.
STEVE GAYNOR: Well, it was early on, we had a knife fight, just because, like I said, I wanted the circus level. Unfortunately, that was not going to be feasible, and Alex knew it. But we got it out of our system.
ALEX MUNN: Yeah, solved it with fist fights in the parking lot.
STEVE GAYNOR: So, we’re over that and working together beautifully now.
ELIZABETH TOBEY: All joking aside, they did tell me how they avoid clashes, and actually, it seemed that this kind of design team structure was a perfect way to avoid many designer versus artist disagreements. Harkening back to something Steve had touched on earlier, if a designer and artist each worked on a level separately, there would be obvious disconnects between how the level had to be structurally developed such that it didn’t impede gameplay, and how the level should be structured so it was visually pleasing, and immersive. When work is siloed, conversations on how to meet both those demands don’t happen naturally, as they do in 2K Marin. In fact, those discussions include more people than just Steve and Alex, because a game has many different elements that go far beyond structure and visual art.
ALEX MUNN: It’s really interesting, our process is. We have various layers, like the different people working on a level have the design layer and the art layer and the visual effects layer and the sound layer, and we integrate those about once a week.
STEVE GAYNOR: Yup.
ALEX MUNN: So occasionally we’ll throw in something, an experiment or something like that, and it’ll be the Monday Morning Surprise. And it’ll be like, “What the heck is that thing?”
STEVE GAYNOR: Yeah.
ALEX MUNN: But usually, we negotiate and come to some sort of…and usually they’re pretty good ideas, I think.
STEVE GAYNOR:I think any of the friction that arises is usually early on, where it’s like, somebody comes into a meeting or whatever and has an idea that the other person isn’t aware of yet, and it’s like “We should do this!” and the immediate response is, “Well, wait. We can’t do that because it won’t mesh with this, that, or the other thing.” And then from that point, from both side of the equation, one party might start to warm up to the idea, and the other party might realize that some of the idea isn’t going to work so they scale it back. It’s a compromise, but I don’t think there’s been any serious conflict.
ALEX MUNN: In all honesty, I’ve learned to have a lot of trust in Steve. He makes pretty good calls on this stuff, so far. He hasn’t blown it yet, so…
STEVE GAYNOR: We’ll see. Still time.
ALEX MUNN: So yeah, I’ve learned to just let him roll with stuff, and usually it works really well.
ELIZABETH TOBEY: They’d used another term that intrigued me – “layers.” What did it mean to have multiple layers of design, and how did they get that to flow together?
STEVE GAYNOR: Well, on the process side, our tools are much more…from our awesome engineering team, we’ve gotten more tools to have multiple people working on the level simultaneously in their own layers, as you might call them. Some editors actually have a literal layering function that you load up multiple layers into one map and it makes a map. We basically have just identical copies of the map that everyone has, the sound guy, and the environment art and design, and visual effects like fire and smoke and all that kind of stuff. Each of us have our own copy of the map that we make our changes to, and then we have tools to take those changes and integrate them into the master map, which is basically bringing everybody’s stuff together into one place about a week, syncing everything up, and then that’s where we all start off from again, for the rest of that week. So like, communications-wise, if the sound guys are working on my map, I’ll be talking with them and e-mailing and saying, “what about this sequence, what can we do?” And they’ll get to continue the actual implementation work of that while I’m doing my design stuff and Alex is doing his environment art stuff. We’re all getting our stuff done and none of us are holding each other up.
ALEX MUNN: Right.
STEVE GAYNOR: And then, we kinda squish it all together, it makes one map and we look at how it all fits.
ALEX MUNN: I mean, there are people on the team who are working on multiple maps. The visual effects guys are working on all the levels and characters and weapons and all those sort of things. So we’ll go over and ask him, “Hey, can you make this thing?” and then the sound department is giving us attention at certain points.
ELIZABETH TOBEY: These guys were not, however, part of the Level Four Official Team. They had a lot to work on – BioShock 2 is a pretty huge game, after all – and were spread out over multiple levels, doing many different tasks the game required.
STEVE GAYNOR: We’re the only two guys that are devoted 100% to our map. So we’re always going to have our hands in it, and it’s our job to monitor the other work that’s going on from other members of the team at any given team.
ALEX MUNN: And then we’ll have a meeting once a week where we do a review with the leads on the team, and at any point, our map is available for people to download and play. Some times, we’ll actually have play time, where the whole team will play and test things out, or you guys will do design team play sessions.
STEVE GAYNOR: Yeah. Yeah, there’s an ongoing process of review, both with the leads, which is a structured thing, and then with peer review from other level designers or artists that are on our same level, just looking at our stuff and giving feedback. A level is always going to be better, like I mentioned earlier, the more people you can have looking at it. On a designer’s side, at least, that translates to the more people on the team we can have playing it, because as soon as somebody plays it and sends me notes, they’re going to play the game differently than I would, and see things that I’m used to seeing and have tuned out, and that’s going to make it a better experience.
ALEX MUNN: One of the problems I’ve found is that I’ve played the level 6,000 times, so I can close my eyes and basically finish the level. So, I’ll miss things like, “can you see that door from this position? What is the visual path through the level?” I have it memorized, so it’s really helpful to get fresh eyes on the thing, get some feedback.
ELIZABETH TOBEY: It’s the little things that sometimes take a game from being good to great, or great to outstanding. The original BioShock had tons of polish, and was rich with those little moments that, again, made the city feel alive and real.
ALEX MUNN: I was going to say, another thing that we’re working on or will be working on is the mise-en-scène pass, where our level is playable and all the spaces are where they’re supposed to be, and the themes of those areas, but then we go through and do a pass of doing little vignettes and story moments in a particular room. I think that’s a hallmark of BioShock is that you run through there and there’s a body crumpled in the corner, and a burning cigarette and a note, and a smashed whiskey bottle, and you have to create these moments of suspense and intrigue.
STEVE GAYNOR: Yeah. That’s a big part of it on the level side, and the analog of that on the design side is just trying to put in interesting little scripted things or interactive elements in places that the player just might look and be surprised. So, I know the broad stuff, you go here and complete an objective, you go here and there’s a big fight, and we’ve got all that locked down, but what if I’m in this one room, and I glance out this window, wouldn’t it be really cool if the Big Sister ran by at that moment, or any of that little kind of stuff. If I was going up these stairs and a guy came around the corner and kicked a box down it at me. The stuff that players are going to be…they’re going to be memorable to players, even though they’re just the little things that you might catch out of the corner of your eye. That all goes in in the polish phase.
ALEX MUNN: On the art side, I’m just a fanatic about you want the shadow to be projected across the floor the right way and up the wall, and really dramatic aesthetic moments, so you’re constantly cruising around and around your level, trying to find, frame things, make sure you’ve got the right look. What happens when you double back and come back from the other direction? Does that look ok and look interesting?
STEVE GAYNOR: Yeah, looking for opportunities for cool moments.
ELIZABETH TOBEY: I felt like I had gotten a pretty good look into 2K Marin’s process, so I released the level team from my sound booth and watched them disappear back into their studio. They had several months of polish left in them, but I didn’t want to be the one keeping them for one minute longer than necessary (that minute could be used for extra polish, after all.)
After they were gone, I was left to reflect on everything they had said – and it was quite a lot. While 2K Marin is not the only studio working in this way, their process is still pretty innovative, and it not only enriches the levels of BioShock 2, but brings the studio – from small level teams to all those working in the various levels – much closer together, like a finely tuned machine, churning away, breathing new life into Rapture. And while Level Four may not have any spliced clowns, it has Steve and Alex at the helm, and as they have complete faith in each other, they left me with complete faith in them.
I’m Elizabeth Tobey, Community Manager at 2K. See you next time for the third episode of the BioShock 2 podcasts.