Technique Evaluation: Lighting in Game-Guru

If there's one complaint I have about a lot of the homebrew games I see being made with Game-Guru (GG), it's the lighting.  It's clear people are going out of their way to develop games that they play for fun and usually are decent enough - but the lighting is atrocious.  This is because the default settings in GG are less than ideal for most if any games.  They are great for placing objects and determining where you want things to go though.  In that sense it's great as it shows you exactly what you did wrong because the seams and shadows stand out like a sore thumb.  Which is precisely why you don't want to use that on your base game.

From a previous article on ground clutter - note the very jarring colors/textures.

There are two different types of lighting in Game-Guru:  Interior and Exterior.  Both have different processes but similar methods.

Interior lighting is highly reliant upon placed static lights.  Exterior lighting much less so as the sun (which is not adjustable at this time) handles a lot of it.

I'll get into interior lighting in another article as it requires a significant amount of changes to level design and methodology.

For exterior lighting, you'll primarily be messing with the 'tab-tab' screen.  To reach it, simply fire up the game in test mode then hit tab twice.  Simple, right?

The 'easy game maker' sure has a lot of complicated options, eh? :)

As you can see in the above picture there are a significant amount of options.

Starting from left to right, top to bottom:

• The 'metrics' are debug information used for troubleshooting speed, efficiency, etc.  That's another discussion for another day.
• World settings are your most basic settings: What type of sky you want, what  kind of terrain you're using, and the type of 'grass' you can paint on the ground.
• Quality settings can be summed up as: LOD = how far away things start to get shitty looking to save on rendering cost, how big the 'map' is, and vegetation settings.
• Camera settings - I almost never mess with this because the defaults are good for most FPS games.  
• Visual settings - the most relevant panel in the list.  This affects the colors and lighting you'll be using.  I'll go into further detail below.
• Graphic options:  This is a more 'high end' feature.  It affects water reflection opacity, how 'thick' the shadows are, lightray amount and vegetation.  Occlusion and debug visuals will require hand tuning in your final pre-game tests.
• Shader options:  I pretty much leave distance transition settings normal and put everything on highest.  
• Post effects: What happens "AFTER" the lighting is done.  Bloom affects how fuzzy your light will look.  Vignette radius and intensity - Primarily used to give that 'old time horror game' feel.  Motion blur distance - I hate motion blur, so I disable this typically.  Depth of field I leave at 25 out of 100 but this can really give your game a sense of distance so definitely play with it to see what works best.

So really we've established that for MOST outdoor scenes your most important settings are going to be found in the visual settings tab.

 So let's start with the fog settings.  Starting in a previous version, the fog system is actually VERY impressive in Game-Guru.  It's a blended technique vs the brute force method original versions used. So in reality it's actually very good for making scenes have a unified color, which in turn helps unify the theme.  It also blends the distance very well so the horizon isn't as sheared.

A good example of using light fog to unify the color palette and theme.

A side note: On unifying colors the idea is that if you take a color and use it as a base or blend for the others you will help make a scene feel less jarring.  This can take the form of a common color, shape, or in this case - a fog to overlay a blended color.

I recommend setting fog nearest to around 5 and fog distance between 10 and 30.  Then select the colors you want from the R/B/G sliders.  Fog intensity will typically be around 30-40, unless you want a very heavy fog.

Someone overdid the fog and lighting, methinks.

Ambiance level is another slider you wll need to modify often; it's how much of the ambience r/b/g levels are automatically applied to a surface.  This is important because the brighter this is, the overall brighter your textures will be.  I generally find a setting between 15 and 25 is best here if the color bars are at 100.

Surface level will show HOW MUCH light is reflected by your textures.  This is especially important outside as it determine how much of the sun's light is put on your textures!  Often you will find less is more with this engine; setting this too high will cause highly pronounced shadows which at times are good but often just make things look very clean and unprofessional.

Yeah, it's the unreal engine.  This picture illustrates a low level of ambient lighting (around 5-10 in game guru terms) and a high level of surface lighting to highlight the sun's light (think 30-50).

Another important setting here is 'global specular'.  This slider controls the mirror-like qualities of the textures being hit with light.  This differs from the surface level because surface level changes the lighting on the textures themselves... global specular changes how reflective it looks.  Imagine the difference between a white wall and a mirror.  Both can reflect light very well, but the mirror has that telltale bright spot.

Image courtesy of 'http://gurneyjourney.blogspot.com'

Specularity is low on the right and high on the left.

Understanding these settings is important for fine tuning your lighting.  There is no one size fits all here.  Every setting has to be carefully measured and tested but it does no good for you to not know what they do or how they work.

Let me know in the comments if this helps your project!

Lessons Learned from Doom 1: PT 3 - Peterson's Level Design.

And here we are.  The final episode of the original Doom.  Not counting 'ultimate doom', that is.

"INFERNO!" 

So around this time, if you're familiar with the mythos of iD software, you find that Sandy Peterson's levels kick in.  Some have described his levels as 'ugly'.  I'd describe them as hideous.  But that said.. let me get to the real crux of the matter here.

I utterly despise Sandy Peterson's levels.  I mean that, of course, in the nicest possible way.  It's actually a compliment.  They did good choosing Sandy as the guy who did the "Hell" maps.  This guy... I mean he's just a sadist, through and through.  His maps make this game very, VERY challenging in very short order.  I can get through the first two episodes on stupidly hard difficulties (including the Brutal Doom versions) without issue.  I get to Sandy's and .. shit just falls apart.

Here's your first indicator something is off.  The very first thing you see on Episode 3 is this closed-eye-switch-thing.  A far cry from the 'unfamiliar rooms' of Tom Hall and John Romero.

Don't worry... it opens when you toggle it.

From this point an elevator rides you upwards to... the surface.  Yes, an actual outdoor area complete with withered trees and... three imps (on ultraviolence setting, of course). 

I find using melee tends to save a lot of ammo when playing his levels.

So you shoot the imps down, pick up two boxes of ammo and open the door to find two Cacodemons.  Now.. this is a big deal for those who don't know.  Cacodemons are TOUGH.  They hit *HARD*.  They generally act as a damage sponge and work best if you use them to kill other minions.  You know - the ones you just iced.  

Damnit, Sandy.

So you tear down these two Cacodemons and are presented with what seems like an obvious trap.  "Get the shotgun, and you'll be better armed!", your mind says.  You, like an obedient dog, oblige in a Pavlovian fashion.  

It's a shotgun on a bridge, what could go wrong?

As you run across the bridge.. it sinks.  Into the lava or blood or .. whatever that hurty liquid shit is.  So you learn to just run across and think something will happen - a wall will drop or ... but nothing happens.  You literally run RIGHT THROUGH THE WALL into ... you guessed it - 3 imps with no room to maneuver.

Damnit Sandy.

This pattern continues.  Over .. and OVER again.  Simple trap becomes complex trap becomes keyboard smashing rage-inducing trap.

This isn't an isolated event.  It happens again...

Damnit Sandy!

and again...

 I SWEAR TO GOD SANDY!

AND AGAIN... 

*Throws Keyboard*

 This insanity was brought to you buy a god fearing Mormon, if you can believe that.

AND IT GOES ON FOR 9 DAMN LEVELS.

Now.. I have to say - I *REALLY* respect the proficiency of Sandy's trap and maze design.  He may make the game less fast paced and fun in the Romero sense - and he may not have Tom Hall's MASSIVE level design with hundreds of secrets - but he really has a truly insidious method of drawing you in and blowing you to pieces.  It has it's own rhythm and there's a lot to learn from.

So here's a few cliff notes I've taken on his methods vs the others:

Sandy's biggest weakness is actually of all things wall textures.  His use of wall textures was ... minimal at best.  His light sourcing was some rock bottom shit.  That said, you barely have time to notice it as you fight for your life in what goes from a run-gun-shootfest to a George A. Romero-esque survival horror.

• Sandy uses very assymetric architecture like John Romero (no relation to George A.) - but in a completely different way.  Areas are large and flat, but open. 
• Use of outdoor is taken to an extreme.  Outdoor areas are huge, with trees and what not.  Presents its own challenges in terms of enemies and mobility.
• Sandy places objects in locations that are deliberately going to impede your movement.  For instance you get pillars in the middle of an area that gets swarmed, doors shut behind you and lock you in against hordes, etc.
• His secrets are nastier than just 'walk in and pop a monster swarm'.  It's more like 'walk in, get item, die in lava unless you move backwards in which case you get crushed by the ceiling instead but oh hey if you survive you get to fight fifteen enemies at once and only get four shotgun shells for your effort.'.  
• Sandy's secrets were INCREDIBLY hard to find.  In many cases they were not intuitive at all.  That said, they were often necessary as part of your progress (if you weren't cheating) just to keep your ammo count from hitting the dreaded goose egg (0).  
• Sandy's Doom 1 levels are time consuming mazes that actually tend to wear on you.  I found this element a lot less fun.  When taken in context with the other two developers it's easy to use lessons from each to strike a balance.

I found myself getting bored by his levels.  The traps became routine (ironically), the ammo scarcity was frustrating on an unnecessary level, and I had no desire to spend 40 minutes getting lost in a maze.

That said, his levels for Doom 2 are SUPERB.  His textures are still a little flat but improve dramatically and the design is interesting and novel.  Though seriously - his traps only get nastier, if you can believe it.

The final word here is despite the negatives Sandy's levels really represented Hell for both the player in a figurative AND literal sense.  So in this, it was a good choice to make his levels the final piece of Doom 1's original set.  I respect the hell out of a guy who can take an action shooter like doom and turn it into what basically amounts to a fucked up version of Myst with shotguns and demons.

So this concludes the Doom 1 level design lesson set.  I hope you've had as much fun reading as I've had writing it.  Hopefully you've learned a few lessons about how the devs managed their design methods - each one had a good and bad side; all of them had things one can glean.  I for one, have learned a great deal and hope to put those lessons forward in practice soon!  I hope a few of you replay doom and maybe post your comments about the design; I'd love to see what else everyone else picked up on this!

Lessons Learned from Doom 1: PT 1 - Romero's Level Design.

Update 1/15/2016 - John Romero built a new level for Doom 1, I mentioned that I wrote this to him and he was kind enough to like and retweet it with this message:

Sounds like a 'compare the old and the new' is in order :D  (see link below)


Also as a courtesy, here's another review someone wrote in a similar vein if you're interested in more: https://speakerdeck.com/vinull/john-romero-level-design-as-presented-by-michael-neel

Update 1/18/2016 - writeup on the new level is here: http://gamegurureport.blogspot.com/2016/01/lessons-learned-from-doom-1-pt-2.html

**** ORIGINAL POST BEGINS HERE ****

Let me make this clear.  I'm a huge, HUGE fan of the original Doom game.  Like "Beat the game on ultra-violence with only my fists" huge.

Doom was one of those games that defined my generation along with grunge rock.  It was mind blowing and endorphin swilling action; something which is lost in today's translation.  What really ceases to amaze me is how I can load up doom what's basically TWENTY YEARS LATER (holy shit, how did that happen?!) and still enjoy it.

Well, most of it.
There's parts I can't stand.  Which we'll go over shortly.


I recently did a playthrough (on ultra-violence, of course) in the doomsday engine to just get a feel of how the level design shifts from designer to designer and how it impacts overall gameplay.  I've read the doom bible, bios, "Masters of Doom" etc.  And I have to say, bar none one indisputable fact:

John Romero might have a titanic ego - but he earned it.  He's the best level designer I've ever seen from a pure gaming standpoint.  His masterworks - the levels in doom, doom 2, quake - are all easily my favorite levels (long before I knew they were his creations).

What spawned all this was I recently found this blog post:
http://vectorpoem.com/news/?p=74

It's a superb writeup from the guy who made one of the best areas in the original Bio-Shock (Arcadia) and Bio-Shock 2's lead dev.

It reminded me - why is it I liked Doom so much - what levels were my favorites?  Why?

So here's the opener:

 

The infamous first thing you see when you start a game in doom.

So right off the bat you have a few really important observations: 

• Colors are a good mix of browns, bright blues, greys, dark greens, and sporadic bright red/greens.  It's well balanced and aesthetically pleasing, palette wise. 
• Natural lighting is clearly present from the window but doubles as  means of 'highlighting the path to take'.  You also have a clear sense of the wall to the right, so you want to explore the left.  When you do you find: 

 

A breathtaking vista.

• I mean it when I say these mountains were something I absolutely loved about the first episode of doom.  The choice of terrain, the eerie white lighting - it's subtle in it's mastery.  A blue sky would overload the scene; a red sky (as is done in later episodes) eliminates contrast on outdoor portions.  
• Of course, after you are sucked in by the incredible concept of being outdoors or 'close enough to touch it' - you start to consider the weirdness of the space.  The design of the level is vaguely human but intuitive; exceptionally so.  Compare that with later levels done by Tom Hall which are exceptionally well ordered and feel 'human' but are cold and distant from a gaming perspective.
• Each room acted as it's own scene; a picture to be taken in - sort of a hologram in that it's a two dimensional picture you can explore, like the eponymous 'computer room':

   

Still one of my favorites. 

• This room was one of the few Romero EVER did that was linear and rectangular.  Even still, it had a clear feel of depth and height.  Every room he made gave you a feeling that the area was far bigger than merely a large box.  It was clear he was tired of running around the Rat-Mazes of Wolfenstein.
• Paths were clearly denoted by color such as here: 

 

• and lighting:

Lovefest aside, I came to realize as I played that as I got to later episodes* - I hated them.  Specifically episode 3. 
*EDIT: I had the word levels in here, swapped it for 'episodes' to clarify.

Each had their own unique style of course.

So I came away with a few understandings about Romero's design philosophy.

There are of course the known tenets of his design method:

            Romero's rules:
                Always changing floor height when I wanted to change floor textures
                Using special border textures between different wall segments and doorways
                Being strict about texture alignment
                Conscious use of contrast everywhere in a level between light and dark areas, cramped and open areas
                Making sure that if a player could see outside that they should be able to somehow get there                               Example:

 

                Being strict about designing several secret areas on every level                Making my levels flow so the player will revisit areas several times so they will better understand the 3D space of the level
                Creating easily recognizable landmarks in several places for easier navigation

These are great rules but I discovered through what's basically amounted to several years of my life in this game the following about Romero's style:

• He prefers fast, streamlined brutality.  Epic high speed fights were his preference.
• He seems to loathe complex mazes. 
• Rooms are huge; outdoor skies are used on indoor scenes to provide a false sense of size.  
• Huge areas give people a sense of awe. Windows were an effective way to do this. Later designers rarely 'left the building' - save Sandy Peterson who periodically would go completely outside.  His designs however, are among my least favorite.
• Light levels are hugely important to him; everything is carefully monitored and aligned to ensure a proper 'alignment' in the brain of where things are - despite the abstract and dreamlike quality to his levels.  
• Abstract level design forces people to think in unique ways; brings them out of the doldrums into something interesting and new; makes them feel surprised by the shape and feel.  Truly lends to the 'alien' feel.
• Asymmetric designs mess with peoples sense of space and encourage fun gameplay.
• His secrets are easily found and of medium proliferation.  They act as a true reward for taking your eyes away from the 'line' of the level. 
• His traps were mostly line of sight, they played off his high speed style that you'd 'run into' a horde of enemies.  Later devs used monster traps in different ways.
• Items are arranged in very obvious locations so you will not easily overlook them. Often, they act as a carrot over a pit of zombies.

There you have it.  There's more of course; coming up I'll go over the pluses and minuses of the other game devs of Doom one; next up will be Tom Hall's levels.  While not my favorite levels I will say far and away he did superb mazes.

I don't care if DaiKatana sucked.  I can't fault Romero for reaching for the stars and failing.  He's done more than I'll ever likely do in Game development and did much of it in short order.  My hat's off to him and I'm sure I'll learn more in another twenty years when I go back and replay the first episode for the four thousandth time.