Making Epic 3D Dungeons, Part Two

Tales of the Rampant Coyote’s Jay Barnson continues his discussion on the lessons he and his small team have learned about 3D dungeon design during the development of Frayed Knights. A sampling:

Mix It Up and Make It Distinct: Locations should be visually distinctive. Unless you really are making a maze, the player shouldn’t have to look to hard to get his or her bearings. Here’s where it may be a good idea to take a page from the old text adventures: remember how (almost) every room had a unique title and text description? Try and think of every location in a 3D dungeon as if you writing a text-adventure description of the room as well (something I am considering taking somewhat more literally as I’m working on the game). Each location should (generally) have a purpose and something that makes it stand out.

Provide Contrast: Light to dark, narrow to wide, shallow to deep, cluttered to clean, dull to vivid anybody who has played Oblivion or Fallout 3 knows how impressive it is to contrast different kinds of areas. Having the player navigate between contrasting areas helps make exploration exciting.

Break Up the Big: A big, open area can be cool (especially provided as a contrast) , but having nothing between you and the horizon-line (or the far wall of a Big Room) is lame. Pillars, towers, terraces, whatever having (stuff) visually to break up the bigger spaces not only makes it interesting, but makes the bigger spaces seem even bigger.