The best door in a video game is the one no one remembers. Sure, everyone can appreciate a large, beautiful door with amazing animations, says Owlchemy Labs developer Pete Galbraith. But in a video game, doors are often synonymous with a major headache in design. Forgetting means that a developer has done their job well. “If it fits in with the environment, makes sense for its context and works exactly as the player expects, then in that moment it was simply a door like any other in the player’s real life,” Galbraith says. “I can not imagine higher praise for a door in a game.”
Over the past week, dozens of developers in various disciplines and teams have shared their frustrations on Twitter. Death drum creator Stephan Hövelbrinks explained that doors “have all sorts of possible faults.” The Last of Us Part II co-star Kurt Margenau call it ‘the thing that took the longest to get right.’ The way doors work differs during ‘battle tension’, when players are facing in the middle, as opposed to not, for example: doors are slowly locked automatically during a fight, but remain open during reconnaissance. “When a player opens a door, not only can it magically open, but the character must reach for the doorknob and push open,” Margenau explained in one tweet. ‘But what about closing it behind you? How do you do this while running? ‘
Doors are not the only ordinary object developer they struggle with. Developers The edge spoken to point to objects such as ropes or mirrors. After Half-life: AlyxThe release expanded one developer of the project on how they could succeed in making the bottles of liquor look so realistic. Designer Liz England also points to ladders, elevators and moving platforms. ‘I think doors themselves have a much bigger reputation because they are terrible because they (1) are so much more common in the real world (I use doors every day!), And (2) then occur much more frequently, in games, so that more people can use it as a touchstone for ‘unexpectedly difficult interactivity’ ‘, says England The edge. “I’ve never had to implement a mirror or a rope, but I had a fair share of the doors.”
A door is not exactly humanity’s best or even smartest invention in the real world. It’s a comically simple concept – an open rectangle for entry or exit – that becomes a team-wide problem in development. As Crystal Dynamics’s game director Will Kerslake puts it in a message to The edge, there are ‘so many problems with doors’. In one example, which specifically touched on animation, Kerslake explained that doors can open to you or away; handles can be on either side. “If you can practice the door from different conditions, such as squatting or sprints, it’s an extra set of animations,” he says. ” A door you open requires you to back up in the real world to step out of the way, that’s another set of issues. In a first person game you can animate the door and not the player, and it’s easier. In a respectful third-person match, the expectation is that the player’s hand will move to the handle. And the players’ location and angle when they link with a door can and will differ.
Other problems can include multiple players scurrying to a door at the same time, or even characters who are not players. If a door hits an NPC, then stop the door or move the NPC? “The choices here can cause all sorts of mistakes, depending on your game,” says Kerslake.
It’s not that making doors in a video game is an impossible task. For some developers, this is not worth it. “As a result, a lot of games avoid doors in the game, and you’d be surprised how many games do not have interactive doors at all,” says Keslake. ‘Many doors, but the important doors are missing or are already open. The next step in complexity is that doors are used only as progress gates; they just open and then can not be closed again. ”
Technical points, of which there are many, are set aside, how players process the digital representation of a door matters. Everyone knows how a door works and therefore has a subconscious understanding and expectation of how they move, sound, look. The level of accuracy required for a player to believe that the door is a door is higher for a common object than a fantasy, says Galbraith.
‘Our ideas about how to deal with them are incredibly clear because of the cognitive reinforcement we have received by communicating with them so often in different ways. For doors as in our homes, we subconsciously learn the finest details of how they behave, such as the rate at which they lock or how much we can move them while they are locked. So if we see a door in a game that closes too quickly or without friction, or if there is a closed door where the handle does not twist and make a sound, we will see that something is not quite right. ‘
You can fib it a little more. For example, while most doors only go in one direction, pin doors will also rotate on both sides. ‘If this kind of virtual door looks, sounds and acts like ordinary doors, then it touches a degree of spiritual acceptance on the part of the player that enables the player to continue without asking why every door in the game is so of they open down. , ”Says Galbraith. “To them, it’s just a strange coincidence that the brain subconsciously chooses to ignore it.”
Doors are not just an aesthetic or immersion technique in video games; often they serve as part of level design. These are gates that prevent players from moving until they have completed a puzzle or beaten a boss; they can act as markers for the player’s progress, build up tension or act as cover. “Doors are just one of a variety of tools a developer can use to design levels,” says Galbraith. “Many games use other methods next door to avoid potential problems and even just to help vary the content.”
With one exception: “Unless the door was very small and cute, in which case it’s just door-state!”