Immersive Design-
By: Kedhrin Gonzalez
11/05/05

Introduction:
Immersive Design is the form of design level designers use to bring their levels to life. Technology has been limiting us in the past from doing too much with immersive design until recently. Now, levels need to be judged not just on design and art but immersion as well. Immersion is a necessary element in levels, it makes the player feel like they are there in the game, living and breathing with the world around them.

Let’s look at some games that have done amazing jobs with Immersive Design in the past.

1. Shenmue/Shenmue 2 – The Shenmue series is without a doubt the most immersive games ever made. The player is thrown into a game world that is living and breathing, tricking the player into thinking it is working with or without them.
2. Call of Duty/Call of Duty 2 – The CoD series of games did an amazing job with Immersion. The heat of combat left the player feeling as if they where actually struggling to survive. CoD brought a realistic balance of high action with cool down periods, making the player not to be overwhelmed with the action to the point where they get numbed by it.
3. Doom 3/Quake 4 - These games, using advanced technology visually brought the games to life. The computers working around you, machinery going about their daily business without you. The scenery so detailed that the player just put them into their head as realistic. Like walking into a huge mechanical room, there would be so much detail the player wouldn’t be able to catch every single bit of detail consciously but their brain is still processing what is going on around them.
4. Half-Life/Half-Life 2 – The Half-Life series brought in a world to the player that made them feel as if they where a pawn in the game. From small background things like the g-man being in areas where he shouldn’t be, to big blaring propaganda TV screens to struggling rebels fighting against the system around the player. The level designers in the half-life series put forth the sense of a world torn apart.
5. Silent Hill Series – The Silent Hill games are known to be scary not for the jump moments like the Resident Evil games, but for the ambient effects in the game. Silent Hill brought forth a horrific world with immersion techniques such as the scenery changing into a place the player would not want to go into, darkness with a flashlight and the cold, deathly silence of an empty deserted town.

This article is not to tell you how to do immersive design. It is not made in the form of “I am correct”, this is simply my outlook on immersive design. There is no right or wrong way into bringing your levels to life. I hope this article is not looked upon from you, the reader as an instruction so much as it is my input. You may take what you want from it, and you may disagree with what you wish. Whatever you look at upon this article, you will learn from it in some way.

Magic! – The Masters of Illusion

Immersive design is a lot like magic to a certain extent. When doing magic, you the magician know to create illusions with your surroundings and the tools you have available. Immersive design is a lot like this. We are creating an illusion of a world coming alive, a world breathing and thriving with or without life.

To understand this, we need to look into how the human brain works.

When we go about our daily lives, we take in to our perspective of reality what we focus on. What you focus on in your mind the brain processes and you can remember easier, you have your full attention to what you are looking at. However, there are other things going on in the world beyond what you are focusing on that your brain is still processing yet you don’t actually consciously remember.
Let’s take the situation of you being at a basketball game. You are in the stands, with thousands of other screaming fans watching two teams play a game. You are focusing on the players, primarily, you are focusing on where the ball is.
Now, let’s take away all the fans except you and replace them with manikins. Let us keep the sound of the roaring fans all around you. You are there, but you lose touch, the feeling of being in a stadium full of roaring fans is not there so much. Even though you are focusing all your might onto the game and the players playing the game, your brain is still processing what is going on around you. Let’s take away the sound of the fans, now what do you have, you don’t really have a basketball game at all. The audience is stiff as a board, and quiet as the forest, you are more watching a practice game done internally by the teams then a real game.

This is common sense, but it is often over looked by level designers both professionals and amateurs. You have to serve the player a breathing world, down to the tiniest detail. There is no such thing as unnecessary detail unless it is breaking your performance.

Let’s create a room, a science laboratory for example. We create our hollow cube for the room, place in some cabinets, some tables, some equipment, lighting. Most level designers would say they are done and move to the next room. The room is not complete until you walk in the room and are convinced it is real. Graphically it does not matter, you can walk into a room that is 100 polygons in total and still make it feel realistic.

Immersion is done a lot through sound, moving objects and things that will fit with the style of theme you are trying to do.

If you are working on a construction yard that is supposed to be a non-hostile area, you would fill it with construction workers, operating machinery, talking to each other and going about their every day chores of working in a construction yard. The sounds of the machinery going off, breaking the dirt as they dig in, lifting metal, hammering, drilling, sawing and more goes on in this construction yard. But the construction yard is not the only thing going on in the world. What is going on beyond the construction yard? The streets outside of it would have cars driving on it, the occasional person walking about. The buildings would have lights on, windows open, watching tv and more. The sky might have the occasional bird flying, clouds slowly drifting across the sky or planes flying around. The world is filled with life every direction you look, it is your job to create the illusion that all of this is going on.

Let’s take for example however a horrific level, a quiet, desolate map that has no life in it that you want the player to be aware of until it is too late. Your best reference for this is an abandoned building, before you ever try to attempt a horror style map, I recommend exploring an abandoned building by yourself both during the day and at night. To some people, it is a very horrifying experience.

Why is this? The sound is so deathly quiet, that every time you hear a sound it scares you. Visually, the buildings are filled with decay which the human brain in this time and day is not used to seeing so much (depending on where you live). Rust and industrial designs do the most damage on the viewer’s mind, when we see something rusting up the brain knows it is not taken care of anymore and that no one cares for it. Let’s say you are putting the player into a world filled with zombies, the player has gone into a mansion to look for someone. How can you make this place scary?

If the mansion is new, and is not decaying, your elements of approach are the quietness and the stiff lifelessness the world will have. You could click off the lights, but some say that is a bad game play element (I completely disagree however). But let’s not do that, let’s say the lights where left on, some bizarre accident happened and everyone in the mansion is now a zombie, how are you going to pull it off?

Rule 1: No Music
Music will destroy the feeling of a lifeless world.

Rule 2: Ambient Noise is your friend
If the electricity is on, make sure the ambient noise is crazy, like how you would feel if you entered a deathly quiet house. You’d hear the lights buzzing, the A/C turning on and more. The sounds of the footsteps on the surfaces, wood creaking, doors closing and more that will make the player feel alone from friendly company.

Rule 3:
Do you want a thriller? Or a psychological thriller? For a thriller, you could have the player walking by a door and a zombie bust out. Sure this will make the player jump, but the player is only scared because they don’t know when the next part they are going to jump to happens. A psychological thriller, you will infect the players mind with so many disturbing images they will want to quit playing the game because their brain is so terrified they do not want to see what they are seeing. If you are feeling really daring, you will go very far beyond every moral standard we have set for us. That is your choice though, I recommend it but you did not hear it from me. Have the player walking in a normal area, then they turn the corner and are slammed in the face with something so bizarre and unknown they will get scared. The human brain fears the unknown, above all else.

So how do you go about creating these real life scenarios in a game? Game tech only allows us to do so much, because of hardware limitations. You need to look at things from this point of view, the player may walk outside only for a few minutes in a battle zone to escape to a helicopter, they may only be shooting the people in front of them. Bad immersion design is to simply have explosions going off. Where are these explosions coming from, where are the bullets coming from, if the player stopped for a second to look around, they’d see nothing. Think of it to the sense of this, if the player stopped at any one moment in your level to look around and pay attention to what is going on, what will they see? Will the world be alive, or will it be as static as a Lego built city. Do not ever think that the player will never stop to pay attention. Because chances are they won’t. That is why there is immersive design. The things you create in your world, the player does not consciously recognize but the brain still processes. This brings the game one step closer to reality for the player.

Sound-

Sound is the most critical element in making an immersive environment. When you walk into an office building, what kind of sounds do you hear? This is where you take yourself, put yourself in a real life area and gather your references. Computers make noises, vending machines make noises, etc. There are still a lot of limitations on sound these days, but you can still put in enough to make the world a better place for your user. Choose sounds that you think balance on the point of the player hearing/not hearing. Because of our limitations in hardware, you have to be very picky with this. You also have to be smart with it. The sounds a computer make are not loud (usually) so the player should only hear them if they stop and are sitting right next to them and is very faint. The player roaring past the computer blazing a gun, chances are they won’t hear it. When the gunfire has stopped, and there is none left standing but you however, the player will be thrown back into the ambience of the world.

Chose your sounds wisely, I would not choose sounds that there is probably no chance the player’s brain could ever even hear.

Background Noise-

Polygon limitations have increased dramatically, especially with new shader technologies and more we are given the ability to make the world come to life with people walking where you can’t really get to them, etc. This is also an area where you need be careful with what you chose. If the player will never get to them, there is no point in making them high detail. If they are far beyond reach and the player cannot get close to them (including a zoom) you can use a very low polygon character with minimal effects on them.

The biggest thing you want to do with Background Noise is make the world feel like it is living and doing it’s own thing without the player, in other words, you are making a world – not a world for the player. Consider every person you place in your map a real life person, what are they doing? How are they feeling? What is their goal for today?

Do these things and the player will feel like they are in a living, breathing world.

Music-

Music is a very tricky immersion technique; I have seen it done poorly a lot of times. When putting in music, you really have to think of the style of game play you are going for. Music will influence how the player feels during a game, it will make them sneak, make them scared, make them fight faster, etc. You need to be very picky with the music you chose, if any music at all for your level. Listen to the music you are putting into your level over and over, see if it really fits the mood of the map or not. Some games have done horrible with music, playing the same song over and over throughout the entire game. Avoid doing this as much as possible. Some players identify their surroundings by music, so keep that in mind as well.

Also remember, that a lot of players turn off music, so make sure you make your level enjoyable with, or without music.

Lighting-
Lighting is extremely critical, poor lighting is one of the primary reasons why so many maps are looked down upon. Your lighting must fit the mood of the map or your map will fail. Your lighting must also be clean at all times, there cannot be any errors. If you have to spend 8 hours on a single room perfecting the lighting, that is what you’ll have to do to get yourself practicing good techniques to insure a total immersive environment.

Lighting sets moods of maps, you hear the saying “let’s set the mood” and dimming the light. It is the same thing, darker lit areas usually go for scarier areas. Bright lit areas are usually friendly. However, lighting is different across all medians of themes for levels. So just make sure you stick to the mood of your map.

Geometry Detail-

This is a very hard thing for some level designers, too much or too little detail. If you have too much detail, the player will get numb to the surroundings and won’t be able to identify points of interest, which are critical to making maps. Too little of detail makes maps look out dated and not really a good map at all. You need to balance detail in your maps. Detailed areas are great for interiors, destroyed areas, etc. It all depends on the mood of your level. Simple flat square rooms are usually never acceptable, as there is no detail at all besides the primary world brush.

What to do for a scene-

Let’s take a complete scratch example of a room with no design in it. The level is dark corridors in an industrial yard, where a lot of action needs to be going on. For this Immersion approach, say you built a big complex inside a building, full of pipes, fans, vents and other machinery. This place needs to be either very noisy or very quiet. If it is quiet, it needs to have the power shut off in most places to let the player know that everyone went home for the evening.

Not every one of us has been in an industrial yard, so you need to tie the player into things they are familiar with industrial scenarios (unfortunately, what Hollywood has delivered to the player could be a good reference). Take Nightmare on Elm Street or Terminator 2 for this example. Glowing lights, machinery moving, hissing of steam, banging of chains, pipes, etc. all of these effects going on give a more alive environment.

The basic thing I see most level designers doing is creating a big room, putting in some lighting, animating a few fans and that is it. Make the world feel more alive, make it look as it people are working there. Leave a coffee mug on a machine flat top, leave a jacket on a stool, some papers on the ground, etc.

Keep in mind what you can do, to bring the player one step closer to believing they are there, remember it is always what the brain processes not what the player consciously recognizes is what brings immersion to the player.

My Techniques-

So, now that I’ve gone over a few topics in the area, I will describe to you my techniques.

Let me provide a simple example. I am making a level, where you are with a gang of thugs and you are about to sneak into a complex to steal something. The mood is modern Urban, nighttime and you need to sneak to get around. The complex is heavily guarded with security guards carrying flashlights.

This is key to designing your level, design every possible angle of fiction for you level before attempting this. The complex is of nothing interesting, the security guards are just there for the extra dab of security so they are never really on high alert. The complex is run by a rich guy who stores valuable goods in the complex. The guy doesn’t have any enemies, and is friends with a lot of people so no one messes with him.

The security guards are slackers, guys that never went anywhere in life so they had to get a job doing security, they like the job they have now because they play around and occasionally do their job ‘right’ because of their manager. The complex has never had an instance of break-ins in the past.

You and the thugs that are with you don’t know what is in the building, other than you know you want some.

How would I go about building this into an immersive environment-

From the beginning, I would not put the player at the entrance of the complex; instead I would make the player come up to the complex surroundings from the street. Now, there will be no real danger of walking on the streets, the thugs with you will be walking normal. In the streets, the buildings will have lights. A few people will be inside places, on porches talking and a few cars driving around. I’ll do this with scripted events, I will script the cars to drive around at certain points where the player enters, I will sequence the talking of people as the player approaches. As the player passes by an open window he will hear a TV playing in the building, but can’t actually see inside it.

When the player approaches the complex, the thugs with the players will change their mood, they’ll begin to sneak and whisper. The guards in the complex are standing around talking, every now and then one will walk away joking, laughing really loud. This will let the player know the guards are not serious about their job, making it easier for them to either sneak past them or take them out. For a sneaky type area, I would make plenty of areas for the player and his gang to hide behind. I would let the security guards path into areas where the player can get to them without causing too much noise. During the whole time in the complex, the player will hear things going on outside of the area, cars driving, the sound of a busy city in the distance. The guard stations will have a radios playing. The player will be given the chance to sneak past guards who are idle chatting about the game they watched today, or something perverted they did the night before. Anything you can do, to put across that the guards are slackers and don’t really care for their job.

If a guard was to hear a noise, he’d go take a look, but he would not say the cheesy lines I hear in most games “Well, I guess it was nothing!”. Seriously. Give the player some more realistic dialogue, if you where a slacker guard and you heard something what would you do? You would probably go check it out, nothing would be there and you would say something like “stupid cats” or something similar. The guard would most likely start smoking a cig, rest his back against something and just sit there. The slacker guard would not take all the energy to come check out what just happened, and then walk all the way back to his last position.

The player and his group of thugs make their way to the back door of the complex, try to get in but the door is locked. You give the player the ability to break in or try to find a key. Let’s make this interesting, let’s say the player decides to break in. How will these slacker guards really react then when the alarms all of the sudden go off. They will panic, be confused and all rush to get together, they will yell to one another instead of doing things ‘by the book’.

Now, from most of the games I’ve edited, a lot of these things are completely possible through scripted events. I have noted it to myself, and I recommend it to others to never rely on programmatic responses to the game world for your immersion feel. The best I have ever seen this done was in Half-Life 2. But the characters still felt as if they where lifeless.

Scripting your levels will be a lot of work, but scripting is what brings your level to life. Depending on the engine you are using, you can setup random scripting events, in other words, setup your scripting system some how to be able to be random every time for replay ability. I call these random chain events, you have a start, but it branches out like at tree, at every intersection there is a right and left, you randomize it so it is different every time.

The key thing you need to always keep in mind when making your immersive level, is to make the world work without the player. This will take a lot of scripting, but with the right approach to the scripting setup you can save yourself a lot of time.

Immersion or not?-

Not every game you will edit will allow you to create these environments. From horrifying decrypt abandoned buildings to medieval castles, the choice is up to you how you want your world to come alive. You have to keep in mind at all times the things that go on beyond the players conscious thought is still processed in the brain. The references you get are key to creating an immersive environment. For fantasy and sci-fi fiction areas, your imagination in this area is critical.

Design everything, design your level from the base fiction and up, go back 3 generations up the beginning of your level if you have to. If you don’t believe in your level when you make it, no one will believe in your level when they play it. Immersive design in the next generation of games will be the things the players will want. They will want to feel the heat of battle, they will want to play in a thriving, living world. If you are a professional, sometimes getting everything you need to create the most spectacular map will be difficult. That is why I say do things on your own, if you can’t do sound – don’t set yourself to depend on others, learn it yourself. If you can model, learn it. Set yourself to be your own one man army for creating these levels. When you have complete control over the creation process of your level, and you have the determination and innovation, you will have success.

But, you can also not do immersion at all, most of the levels I have seen done by amateurs have no immersion feel at all. I’ll admit, I used to be in that batch as well. Hopefully, those who do not think of these things will have a better insight of creating an immersive environment.

-Kedhrin "Peeves" Gonzalez