kyliethicc
Member
Found this really cool, long, and detailed breakdown by Arnaldo Licea, a level designer from Naughty Dog, on how they designed one of the levels in The Last of Us Part II. It takes place in a flooded mall in Seattle. Sharing this since I found it interesting to read and learn more about this game's excellent level design.
So, with that high-level direction in mind, how to start? In building the structure for how the whole chapter would play out, I began where pretty much every level designer on the project begins: looking at Google Maps. We knew for certain that we wanted to start the level from the theater, which we knew which one we wanted to reference, and wanted to end in the aquarium, also inspired by a real world location. So I started doing some location scouting on what areas could be good beats to hit. We always talked about going through the convention center but I also found some other areas that drew my attention, including the GameWorks arcade, the monorail area between the Westin hotel towers, and the mall.
I loved the idea of taking the boat inside buildings that felt like caves so I was fully onboard to recreate the feeling from this concept art for a flooded Seattle mall but I wanted it to be a combat space instead of a mellow traversal layout. The grandness of the high ceilings and multi-level structure made it a perfect place for a seemingly insurmountable task.
The mall was particularly inspiring because of a piece of blue sky concept art we had:
Player Mechanics
One of the biggest things to think about was how it would feel to swim as Ellie and how do we tune swim to work with combat that did not make it feel like Uncharted? Ellie is not Drake. In Uncharted 4, swimming was a good way to reset combat and get back into stealth. You could just jump in the water, swim to the other side of the level, and kind of wait for enemies to lose you. This felt fine in a fast-paced action game like Uncharted but The Last of Us is about improvisation and tension. Swimming is something that only the player can do but we wanted it to feel risky to use.
Throughout production we tweaked various things like how long can Ellie hold her breath, how fast she can swim, how much of the environment can you see underwater, if you drop from a high ledge that you remain underwater, etc. In Uncharted 4, Drake could shoot from the water but we definitely didn’t want to do that for Ellie. While we got a lot of push back from focus testers sometimes, we thought that this was a good way to communicate that Ellie is not an action hero like Drake. The balance was tough but, in the end, I feel we hit our goals of not making Ellie feel like a fish, having the tension that you can escape in water but still run a risk — you may run out of breath or emerge around enemies, but above all, a mechanic that is fun to play.
Layout Metrics
It was very important to establish good metrics for swimming. In combat, especially, you don’t want to run into ambiguous metrics that can cause frustration and potentially get you killed. You want things to be clear and readable so that you can spend your time planning out your next move or escaping from enemies. It was also really important to be consistent about the metrics. For example, all ledges you can climb from water are 0.25m above the surface and the platform wall always extends below the surface to indicate a potential climbing platform. Anything between 0.25m and 0.75m would be too ambigous for climbing.
For anything underwater, the metrics are more loose. They kept changing as we tweaked the breath meter. We wanted Ellie to start running out of breath before getting to the exits to encourage improvisation. Believe me, we tweaked this till basically the end. It required so much to come together, like underwater readability and more, in order to properly assess it.
Enemy AI
The other big question was how do enemies react to you in water? Can they hear your splashes? How do they path around a space that sometimes requires swimming to get across? This was a combined effort from the AI team, the combat designer, and layout. We knew for sure we didn’t want enemies to swim. We wanted them to react to the water because players expected them to but when we added a audio event that enemies could hear, the combat became exponentially more difficult. For this one, we had to just keep it simple and have them not hear the splashes but have them follow you to the water and try to shoot you, if you get spotted.
Matthew Gallant, the combat designer for the mall, made this bespoke system where enemies could try to predict which hole you were bound to come up from. For a time, it was extremely difficult to get anywhere! We tuned it down and found a balance because we also wanted to be able to see enemies from below the surface. Having them be near the edge allowed for this.
We also tweaked how deep in the water they can see you. So if you’re below 2 or 3m underwater, enemies will start losing you. We kind of cheated this by using an invisible plane with stealth grass properties on it. Our stealth grass already had features that decreased how much enemies could see you so we just used it for the water and it worked great! The deeper you swim, the harder it is for enemies to spot you.
In the end, we were able to make enemies feel unique because of the combat encounters unique mechanic while still leveraging our combat sandbox mechanics. It was a tricky balance to strike, for sure.
The Seattle mall is mostly a semi-circle structure. I kind of liked that because it already gave me an asymmetrical space to work with. I also liked that the center was big and open because it created a big no man’s land that I wanted players to be able to swim across when traversing from one end to the other. Originally, I used the sides as lanes, with some open stores, but it was more of a bowl. The boat was at the end but you could basically just swim up to it. You didn’t really feel like you were earning it and it didn’t accomplish the feeling we were looking with Ellie having to overcome huge odds against her. I always kid around that for The Last of Us level design: “When in doubt, break it down”. Meaning that we can use destruction as a way to get the shapes we need in gameplay. We strive to make our spaces feel authentic but not every space is ideal for the gameplay you want so I collapsed the ceiling of the mall to create this big physical barrier to the boat.
This afforded me several things. It partitioned the space in two, which presented a fork for the player to choose a lane to progress through, it created a path for enemies to cut you off above, so if you swim to the other lane and they can’t follow they can still be in front of you, and finally, it allowed me to position the player for a good view of the boat before entering the second half of the combat.
The first space also became a sandbox to get you used to swim combat and then the second half put the goal in focus and expands on that gameplay. It became an encounter of stages, which felt right for an infiltration.
The Setup
One of my favorite combat encounters to work on from The Last of Us Part II was the mall infiltration. Ellie has come to a point in her journey towards finding Abby in the aquarium where she can no longer travel on foot because of massive flooding. There is a sense of urgency in the narrative where it’s imperative to find a solution. She follows an enemy boat into the mall where she must infiltrate and commandeer it to be able to accomplish her goal.The Location
The original high-level direction I got was to build a combat encounter that serves as a showcase from swim combat, a first for The Last of Us, the introduction of a playable motorized vehicle, also a first, and progressive complications for Ellie, especially in light of her and her companion splitting ways in this point of the story.So, with that high-level direction in mind, how to start? In building the structure for how the whole chapter would play out, I began where pretty much every level designer on the project begins: looking at Google Maps. We knew for certain that we wanted to start the level from the theater, which we knew which one we wanted to reference, and wanted to end in the aquarium, also inspired by a real world location. So I started doing some location scouting on what areas could be good beats to hit. We always talked about going through the convention center but I also found some other areas that drew my attention, including the GameWorks arcade, the monorail area between the Westin hotel towers, and the mall.
I loved the idea of taking the boat inside buildings that felt like caves so I was fully onboard to recreate the feeling from this concept art for a flooded Seattle mall but I wanted it to be a combat space instead of a mellow traversal layout. The grandness of the high ceilings and multi-level structure made it a perfect place for a seemingly insurmountable task.
The mall was particularly inspiring because of a piece of blue sky concept art we had:
Swim Combat In The Last of Us
So now that I have a location and goals in the level, it was time to start figuring out what swim combat was like for The Last of Us. We’ve done swim combat before in Uncharted 4 and Liz Fiacco had done some test layouts in pre-production but it was now time to put all of those learnings into a production level.Player Mechanics
One of the biggest things to think about was how it would feel to swim as Ellie and how do we tune swim to work with combat that did not make it feel like Uncharted? Ellie is not Drake. In Uncharted 4, swimming was a good way to reset combat and get back into stealth. You could just jump in the water, swim to the other side of the level, and kind of wait for enemies to lose you. This felt fine in a fast-paced action game like Uncharted but The Last of Us is about improvisation and tension. Swimming is something that only the player can do but we wanted it to feel risky to use.
Throughout production we tweaked various things like how long can Ellie hold her breath, how fast she can swim, how much of the environment can you see underwater, if you drop from a high ledge that you remain underwater, etc. In Uncharted 4, Drake could shoot from the water but we definitely didn’t want to do that for Ellie. While we got a lot of push back from focus testers sometimes, we thought that this was a good way to communicate that Ellie is not an action hero like Drake. The balance was tough but, in the end, I feel we hit our goals of not making Ellie feel like a fish, having the tension that you can escape in water but still run a risk — you may run out of breath or emerge around enemies, but above all, a mechanic that is fun to play.
Layout Metrics
It was very important to establish good metrics for swimming. In combat, especially, you don’t want to run into ambiguous metrics that can cause frustration and potentially get you killed. You want things to be clear and readable so that you can spend your time planning out your next move or escaping from enemies. It was also really important to be consistent about the metrics. For example, all ledges you can climb from water are 0.25m above the surface and the platform wall always extends below the surface to indicate a potential climbing platform. Anything between 0.25m and 0.75m would be too ambigous for climbing.
For anything underwater, the metrics are more loose. They kept changing as we tweaked the breath meter. We wanted Ellie to start running out of breath before getting to the exits to encourage improvisation. Believe me, we tweaked this till basically the end. It required so much to come together, like underwater readability and more, in order to properly assess it.
Enemy AI
The other big question was how do enemies react to you in water? Can they hear your splashes? How do they path around a space that sometimes requires swimming to get across? This was a combined effort from the AI team, the combat designer, and layout. We knew for sure we didn’t want enemies to swim. We wanted them to react to the water because players expected them to but when we added a audio event that enemies could hear, the combat became exponentially more difficult. For this one, we had to just keep it simple and have them not hear the splashes but have them follow you to the water and try to shoot you, if you get spotted.
Matthew Gallant, the combat designer for the mall, made this bespoke system where enemies could try to predict which hole you were bound to come up from. For a time, it was extremely difficult to get anywhere! We tuned it down and found a balance because we also wanted to be able to see enemies from below the surface. Having them be near the edge allowed for this.
We also tweaked how deep in the water they can see you. So if you’re below 2 or 3m underwater, enemies will start losing you. We kind of cheated this by using an invisible plane with stealth grass properties on it. Our stealth grass already had features that decreased how much enemies could see you so we just used it for the water and it worked great! The deeper you swim, the harder it is for enemies to spot you.
In the end, we were able to make enemies feel unique because of the combat encounters unique mechanic while still leveraging our combat sandbox mechanics. It was a tricky balance to strike, for sure.
The Layout
StructureThe Seattle mall is mostly a semi-circle structure. I kind of liked that because it already gave me an asymmetrical space to work with. I also liked that the center was big and open because it created a big no man’s land that I wanted players to be able to swim across when traversing from one end to the other. Originally, I used the sides as lanes, with some open stores, but it was more of a bowl. The boat was at the end but you could basically just swim up to it. You didn’t really feel like you were earning it and it didn’t accomplish the feeling we were looking with Ellie having to overcome huge odds against her. I always kid around that for The Last of Us level design: “When in doubt, break it down”. Meaning that we can use destruction as a way to get the shapes we need in gameplay. We strive to make our spaces feel authentic but not every space is ideal for the gameplay you want so I collapsed the ceiling of the mall to create this big physical barrier to the boat.
This afforded me several things. It partitioned the space in two, which presented a fork for the player to choose a lane to progress through, it created a path for enemies to cut you off above, so if you swim to the other lane and they can’t follow they can still be in front of you, and finally, it allowed me to position the player for a good view of the boat before entering the second half of the combat.
The first space also became a sandbox to get you used to swim combat and then the second half put the goal in focus and expands on that gameplay. It became an encounter of stages, which felt right for an infiltration.
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