Hello guys, I’m a level designer, and more specifically in racing games. Founder of my own studio I’ve been working for several years with Kylotonn Games, the french developers behind the rebirth of the WRC licence (WRC5, WRC6 and WRC7). Now specialized in racing, Kylotonn learns and builds knowledge about everything on wheels, from motocycles in Tourist Trophy, to arcade titles like Flatout4 or a more simulation kind with the WRC series.
This article is about how we've built the WRC7 tracks and how we worked - how we managed the workflow of WRC7's level design.
1- Understanding before producing
References, references references! We aren’t artist creating realistic assets but we still badly need to search, analyze and understand references.
In WRC7 we’ve got 13 differents rallies, each one in a different country. They aren’t "closed tracks" like Nurburgring or Imola where a tarmac look and feel like any other, with the same signs, with perfect curves and only one path. Every country has a specific road legislation, with their own roads. In Mexico you’ll have bumpy sand roads with curves and a smooth surface leading to the top of the mountain, but in Germany you’ll be confronted with smooth and narrow tarmac going up and down hills and a lot of corner intersections. Just like artists we have to know and most of all understand why the road has been made this way.
We also share and cross references with artists, because level designers and artists don’t look for the same thing, and every time I ask an artist about a country, the first remark is about the vegetation. We don’t care about knowing the names of trees or grass, but we do care about where and which kind of vegetation grows, because for us vegetation means obstacle for the car and bad readability of the road. A dense vegetation close to a road can also be sign of a bumpy road because of the trees roots growing under, or mean a slippery road due to the mud of the side road coming on the tarmac. Two brains always means more information, no matter if it’s another designer or not; and even if you didn’t learn anything on the country talking with an artist, maybe he did, talking with you.
In Argentina the rally takes place in a rural region of the country, somes of the stages take place at the top of mountains up to 2700 meters of altitude where there is no interest for the locals to build proper tarmac roads because the road basically leads nowhere and is no longer used by car traffic. Some roads have been created one hundred years ago with pickers. There are deformed rocky roads at the top and smooth gravel in the valley. Once you learned that, your design starts to take shape, you are no longer making a track or a road, but recreating a true and credible part of Argentina.
In the case there isn’t any story to tell, make one. Create and shape one that the player can understand and above all “feel”. The scenario of your track or your stage is very important for the player but for you too. It drives your design and shapes the environment. Maybe the road goes through a perfect desert and you won’t have any clue what to begin with. Maybe there is a simple ghost town on the way, a canyon, a drive in between two sand dunes, a wider road with wet sand on 1 mile. The more you approach an oasis the more there will be secondary roads connecting to the main road with maybe wet sand tire marks. Maybe the oasis is surrounded by very high sand dunes visible from miles away.
Long range landmarks are important too: having mountains on EAST of your track will allow the player to know the direction is going, he’ll know that at the beginning the mountain was to his right and now they are upfront.
Obviously making a racing game about the Dakar would be harder in level design because there is only few credible tools, where a “sprint race” from the south to the north of Paris would offer a wider panel of tools for your story.
There is always a story.
Maybe you aren’t working on a realistic game and credibility is none of your concern. From my point of view it still is. Every video game player has come out of his room the day his internet went down to explore the real world, seeing roads, cars, accidents, mountains, vegetation... Even if they don’t, they saw a film recorded in Australia or stared at a photoshoot of a journalist in Poland. We all have knowledge, that’s why when you see the Piz tower you instantly know there is a problem, your eye and brain tell you there is one even before you start analyzing what the problem really is. Same thing for buildings with unconventional architecture; the human eye will recognize a building in 100ms but it will probably take two or three times more if the brains has to interpret it.
I’m not saying you have to make a realistic game, only a consistent one. A five branches fork is credible but a one fork fork looks too far from the concept we are used to know.
This means when you do something not credible enough, too different of the reality, you are disturbing the player, increasing the time needed to read the road ahead or reacting; and while driving in a 380 horsepower car driven by a mad man, a fraction of second is the difference between life and death.
Well.
Respawn or stage record at least.
2- Being an artist
My skills in photoshop are...well...particular...and limited. Okay, it’s awful, but it doesn’t mean I can’t imagine what it could look like. Art and level design are very close in racing games and that’s why we have to think about the ones who are going to level build each track. We have to create opportunities for artists to seize. I’m sure each one of us have read, watched or saw enough stuff in our lives to imagine what can be great. Beautiful vista from a mountain, small lakes with a dangerous road connecting them, driving on a barrage… even if it’s empty when we design the tracks, it has to be clear, we need to have a plan to communicate to the rest of the team. Often we put placeholders to replace a gameplay element, but it also can be used to illustrate the graphic ideas. Very often we went to the Art Director asking him what he thought of this vista. Do you like it? Is it representative of the country? How risky is it technically? Is that time consuming? We have to ask ourselves these questions before starting the level design in order to create opportunities.
We’ll see later the idea of “scenario in level design”, and it’s directly linked to think as an artist.
So, even when we started a new track, we used some generic assets previously made: houses, rocks, fences, lakes… artists will replace them pretty quick but it will improve their comprehension and help us test the track in real conditions. It happened that we tested the tracks without any art, not a single tree or a house ; only a road on a heightmap. 100% of the time “micro-tweak” we could have done at this stage were pointless. From my point of view you can’t test a track until you have the road AND what comes next to it. Do the test: make someone drive on a highway alone. Now on the same highway put one truck on his left and another on his right: his lane is still the same size but he will feel trapped, in danger, surrounded by a dangerous environment where he can see the consequences of an eventual mistake. Obvious, right? so do not test your tracks if they are still naked.
I’m getting carried away...bottom line: It’s not a wasted time to put those hundreds of placeholders. It’s an investment.
Keep in mind: we are creating a game and it happens that we are level designers and yes gameplay must be our main concern but it doesn’t prevent us from artistic, theatrical or hollywood-ish ideas.
3- Temper and uniqueness
Now that we have made some researches we understand the roads and the environment in general, we can compare featured countries between each other’s. Some rallies are really unique like Sweden on the snow or Monte-Carlo on narrow mountain roads, those are easy to design because they have so much temper, because their kind of roads and environments are unique.
Even for a player fond of real rallying, we are still designing a game and we have to begin making compromises to balance reality with video game. We have to amplify the specificities of each rally to create a contrast between them, we can’t put too much different ingredients because we want diversity among them. We want the player to feel something different from a rally to another in term of emotion but also in term of challenge.
The global guidelines of the game will be driving the level design. For WRC7 we wanted to have a more realistic approach, to make the player feel what it means to be a rally pilot: dancing on the edge, searching for the limit, pushing beyond reason, exigent, and most of all unforgivable.
Challenge in a track like Finland is all about speed and blind jumping bends, meaning you have two choices: braking on every crest because you can’t see the road behind it, or go flatout and jump at 120 mph in a corner you can’t even see just because your co-driver said so. It’s a unique challenge.
In Corsica you drive on bumpy narrow roads with a lot of turns. You can and want to go very fast because of the tarmac but the bumpy road is unforgivable if you put your tire on the bad spot.
At this point you “only” have to do it all over 13 different rallies. In WRC7 we made the choice with the art team to work first on the more specific rallies first (Finland, Sweden, Deutschland, Mexico…) and then to create the ones which have less gameplay identities (Australia, Sardagna, Spain…) because they can inherit from the previous rallies. For example, Spain is a mixed rally, some part of the stages are on tarmac and other on gravel and mud. One moment you are on a perfectly smooth light grey tarmac going up the hills the next one you are stuck into third gear between two valleys surrounded by dry vegetation and a combination of sand and mud... So we used what has been done in Germany (smooth tarmac) and what we did in Mexico (technical gravel/sand). Let me be clear: it doesn’t mean we copy/past the level designs, me alive it won’t happen. It means we had the same goals and expectations, the almost-same degree of road deformation, the almost-same roads sizes…
Identifying the temper and the challenge of each rally allowed us to have a clear vision of each country and to set the production priorities. This is very important: the global vision of the level design is very important. Without anticipating it you would be stuck after the 5fth country. You know I love to say stupid things so here another one: When you have to slice the cake you've made you bought, you start to count the number of persons around the table: if there is 8 persons and you make 7 slices, someone is going to be hungry... and the more people there are around the table the more you’ll have to think of how to slice it. And if there is only three? Well go on you are almost certain you can do whatever you want that will works.
The same thing applies for road deformation: some tarmac rallies are smooth while others are very bumpy. We do not try to recreate the real rally saying “Hey look at that, the road in Monte-Carlo is kinda old and sometimes bumpy”. But we do classify Monte-Carlo as an average deformed rally compared to very smooth Germany and the ultra bumpy Corsica... So when we start working on it we know how bad we have to deform the road comparing one rallies to another - instead of what it is in reality. By defining the extreme cases (Spain has the smoothest asphalt you’ll find in WRC7 and Corsica is the worst) you can have a very rational approach of the countries. This is very close to using dichotomy.
This allows you to have countries identities that will naturally lead to your golden rules.
4- Landmarks
We need constraints to be creative and efficient so here are some of WRC7:
Rally must be representative of the country it’s held in
Number of stages by country
Length of the tracks (in time of gameplay)
Time of production (in man days)
Okay there is nothing original about it, but this is the base of what we can do, what we are “allowed” to do.
In WRC each track has landmarks. 1 to 3, it depends on the track. They can be visual one like a tunnel or a clearing in a forest but they also can be gameplay such as a deadly descent from the summit of a mountain or a big urban area.
Anyway those landmarks have several utilities.
Player's orientation and memory
The first use is to guide the player through the track. Even if there is only one road and he can’t go anywhere else, the player is going from A to B and to help him to remembering the stage we provide landmarks. He knows he will start the race in a forest, a few miles away he’ll cut through a sawmill and then to the road next to a lake before passing the finish line. He’s no longer driving from A to B but always heading from one landmark to the next one, doing so he can pinpoint himself on the layout of the track. “I know there is a touchy bad cambered after the sawmill”, “Oh yes I can go flatout on the lake’s road”. In an FPS or action game you guide the player through the level, and it’s exactly the same thing. It’s mandatory to landmark the tracks for the player to remember, but also to allow him to talk about the game: “Oh yes select the Mexico track, the road in the canyon is awesome” or to the opposite with “The infinite snow descent in Monte Carlo is unforgiven you shouldn’t play it for your first time”.
We are talking about landmarks that have a precise location, but it also can be 2 miles of road on the side of a mountain without any security barrier, or a combo of 5 consecutive jumps. It’s something unique that comes out of the ordinary, enough to be noticed and remembered. The risk with this is to lose credibility because you want to do something that is too noticeable. A specific location landmark is a minor risk for your track’s credibility.
For example we had a problem in Mexico because the tracks are in a desert area where there wasn’t much to use for a landmark. We had to create mountains after the generation of the map by a world machine to have unique situations such as a crest “on the top of the world” or a bridge over a lake between two mountains. Creating those landmarks took us a huge amount of time because they had to be worked a lot and are several miles long. The results are great and they are investments we had to make because the rally didn't have enough obvious landmarks to offer, meaning we had to increase the production line on the other rallies.
A track shouldn't have too many different sections. In WRC7 we wanted to let the player see, feel and understand the section before passing to another. For example, in Corsica, famous for the sneaky and unforgivable tarmac roads, there is what we call a "goat road": bumpy as hell, barely wider than the player's car and very tortuous, the kind that makes you curse the designers. Those goat roads are not 20 seconds long, because it's too short, there has been for us two uses for them: either it was very short, like 2 seconds of gameplay to link two standard roads, or it was at least 1 minute to let the player understand what the road is about and how he has adapt his driving to stay alive.
<iframe title="Embedded content" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/KS159qAUd1c?start=335&enablejsapi=1&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.gamedeveloper.com" height="360px" width="100%" data-testid="iframe" loading="lazy" scrolling="auto" class="optanon-category-C0004 ot-vscat-C0004 " data-gtm-yt-inspected-91172384_163="true" id="423499460" data-gtm-yt-inspected-91172384_165="true" data-gtm-yt-inspected-113="true"></iframe>Here is a goat road. As a player you will definitely remember it, and curse the designers. But when you finish the track finally able put the controller down, you realize that you drove in Corsica not in Deutschland, thanks to the original temper and the landmarks. The video also demonstrate the primary/secondary roads discussed just below, helping the player to understand where he is driving.
The level designer's guideline
The second utility is a guideline for the creation of the tracks: basically a track is a start, some landmarks and an end line linked by roads. Meaning we didn’t create the track from the start to the end, but we positioned everything and then we made the roads in between.
First reason is because you can’t have enough ideas to make 8 miles of track. When you’ll arrive to the third mile you’ll think everything look the same, that you’ve repeated the same patterns again and again, giving a monotonous flow without a lot of temper.
On the other hand if you have landmarks you are no longer creating roads to fill gaps between the start and the end, but creating access and exit roads to each landmark.
For example: in order to maximize the effect of entering a clearance in a forest you want to arrive with the road oriented to the center of the clearance: it will create a clean cut in the forest and an explosion of breath and luminosity. So you know you need a straight line before the enter and after the exit of the clearance. As said before, the roads have has meaning, they have been made to link two spots: two villages, two farms, water supplies from the valley to the village in the mountain,... - it helps you understanding the “why” of your roads and giving you more guidelines for the “how to do it”.
Access roads, let's talk a bit about them. Finding the correct shape, the right width with enough bumps and visibility is a challenge but we helped ourselves: primary and secondary roads. Every road isn't the same, it's even more true in rural parts of the countries where rallying takes place. This means you'll have a primary road that is wider, smoother with less turns used as an arteria for heavy traffic and long distance driving. Secondary roads, narrower, bumpier.... are on the other hand alternative roads for local habitants, often they are a dead end. The important between those roads (and you can have a third kind, maybe and fourth and so on) is to make the player feel that he is going somewhere instead of following a mindless track. There is not much things more rewarding than leaving a main road and going down an almost vertical gravel road, only to join again the primary road just like Dom, Brian, Chip, Bo or Luke would have done in their movies. And this happens because the player can understand what he has just done. Those landmarks help creating a consistent level design.
Not a track. A network.
5- RNG in level design
Random Numbers Generator. You know, when you’re lucky and put three critical hits in a row? that’s a lucky RNG.
At Kylotonn we have an game engine based on splines. The principle is simple: we place actor points [dots], and they are linked by splines. Then, the road mesh is created along that spline.
Just like in sculpture (told you, I’m a repressed artist) we start by creating the macro shape of the track with the help of the landmarks: where the straight lines are gonna be, the tricky turns, several hairpins in a row etc… and for this we only need a few spline actor points. But when the general layout is validated we need to enter in the details of the track and to create a lot more of actor points, something like one every 10 meters.
In WRC7 we made the choice to deform the road, to create hostile surfaces to drive onto and to create those roads we needed a lot of actor points on the spline to break the smoothness of a curve, create water dips or on camber roads followed by a jump into a narrow corner opening on a wide straight line. We could use tools to duplicate those points but we avoided to do so because the engine would create and place the points in a perfect way. Cold and mechanical precision when us, as humans, are duplicating the points with an average-ish precision. It creates a natural randomness on the road that we can use and work on. There was hundred of miles of road to built and by duplicating every actor point by hand we created imperfection like a computer couldn’t have. Constraints help being creative; sometimes the duplication will create a natural dip or a very tormented road that we can work on.
I’m not saying to ship the game with Skynet creating the roads instead of a human being but rather letting it work for you and stimulate your creativity. It’s even more true when you have to make 200+ miles of tracks in a very short amount of time.
We can’t control and think of every inch of a track, so I lean onto RNG to create opportunities and our work is to provocate and seize the right opportunities. The ones that will matter.
