The Number One Educational Resource for the Game Industry
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Overview:
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Environmental destruction is one of the key ways to increase interaction in games, particularly when combined with a full-featured physics system. As destruction systems become more prevalent in games, the standard pipelines, processes, and even design principles need to be re-examined and adapted to what is essentially a large emergent system.
Volition's Red Faction: Guerrilla pushed physics-based destruction to previously unseen levels this past summer with its GEOMOD 2.0 engine, and the multiplayer component highlighted this system to great effect. After two highly-rated GDC lectures by the team in 2009, the lead multiplayer designer returns to reveal the specifics of the multiplayer level design process and share the lessons learned about how to use and avoid being abused by the destructible environments.
Concepts covered will include:
* The obvious and not-so-obvious ways to use destruction to create dynamic levels
* Advanced strategic uses of destruction and how to encourage them
* The various ways level flow is altered by destruction and terrain
* What to watch out for when creating structures to use in a multiplayer level
* Specific level issues that were fixed through playtesting and iteration
* Technical constraints that need to be worked around or accepted
* Exploits and other design details that are affected by destruction
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