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The best type of door in a video game is one that no one remembers. Of course, anyone can appreciate a big, beautiful door with great animations, says Pete Galbraith, developer of Owlchemy Labs. But in a video game, doors are often synonymous with a huge design puzzle. Forgotten means that a developer has done their job well. “If it fits into the environment, makes sense for its context, and works exactly as the player expects it to, then at that point in time it was just a door as real as any other in it.” the real life of the player, ”explains Galbraith. “I can’t imagine more praise for a door in a game.”
Over the past week, dozens of developers from across disciplines and teams have shared their frustrations on Twitter. Trash can of death Creator Stephan Hövelbrinks explained that the doors “have all kinds of possible bugs.” The Last of Us Part II co-director of the game Kurt margenau called it “the thing that took the longest time to succeed.” The operation of the doors is different during “combat tension”, when players are in the middle of an encounter, and not, for example: the doors close slowly automatically during combat, but remain open during exploration. “If a player wants to open a door, they can’t just magically fly, the character has to reach for the door handle and push it,” Margenau explained in a tweet. “But what about closing it behind you?” How do you do this in a sprint? “
Doors aren’t the only issues common object developers grapple with. Developers The edge spoke to point at objects like ropes or a mirror. After Half-life: AlyxA developer of the project explained at length how they managed to make alcohol bottles so realistic. Designer Liz England also talks about ladders, elevators and mobile platforms. “I think the doors themselves tend to have a much bigger reputation for being terrible because they are (1) so much more common in the real world (I use doors every day!), And (2) are much more common, then, in games, so more people can use it as a touchstone for “surprisingly difficult interactivity,” “England says. The edge. “I never had to put up a mirror or a rope, but I had my fair share of doors.”
A door is not exactly mankind’s best or even the smartest invention in the real world. It’s a comically simple concept – a large open rectangle for entry or exit – that, in development, becomes a team-wide issue. As Crystal Dynamics game director Will Kerslake put it in a message to The edge, there are “so many problems with the doors”. In one example, specifically relating to animation, Kerslake explained that doors can open towards or away from you; handles can be on either side. “If you can engage with this gate from different states, like crouching or sprinting, then that’s an extra set of animations,” he says. “A door that you open forces you to step back into the real world to get out of the way, that’s another set of issues. In a first person game, you can animate the door, not the player, and it’s easier. In a high fidelity third person game, the player’s hand is expected to move towards the grip. And the location and angle of players when engaging with any gate can and will vary.
Other issues can involve multiple players all looking for a door at the same time, or even non-player characters. If a door hits an NPC, does the door stop or does the NPC move? “The choices here can cause all kinds of bugs depending on your game,” Kerslake explains.
It’s not that making doors in a video game is an impossible task. For some developers, it just isn’t worth it. “As a result, many games avoid doors in gameplay, you’d be surprised how many games don’t have interactive doors at all,” Keslake says. “Lots of doors, but important doors are missing or already open. The next step of complexity is that the doors are only used as progression doors, they only open and cannot be closed again. ”
The technical points, which are numerous, put aside, the way in which the actors treat the digital representation of a door count. Everyone knows how a door works and therefore has an understanding and subconscious expectation of how it moves, rings, looks. The level of precision needed for a player to think the door is a door is higher for a common item than for a fantasy item, Galbraith says.
“Our ideas about how we interact with them are incredibly clear because of the cognitive reinforcement we’ve received from interacting with them so often in different ways. For doors like the ones in our homes, we subconsciously learn the tiniest details of how they work, like how fast they close or how much we can move them while they’re locked. So when we see a door in a game that closes too fast or without friction or when there is a locked door where the handle does not move and make a noise, we will notice that something is wrong about it. .
You can always lie a little bit. While most doors only go in one direction, for example, gaming doors often go both ways. “When these types of virtual doors look, sound and behave like normal doors, they achieve a level of mental acceptance with the player that allows the player to continue without wondering why every door in the game just happens to open. . Galbraith says. “To them, it’s just a strange coincidence that the brain subconsciously chooses to ignore.”
Doors are not just an aesthetic or immersion technique in video games; they are often part of the level design. These are doors that prevent players from moving forward until they have completed a puzzle or defeated a boss; they can serve as markers for player progression, create tension, or serve as a blanket. “Doors are just one of the many tools a developer can use when designing levels,” says Galbraith. “Many games use other methods besides doors to avoid potential problems and even just to help vary the content.”
With one exception: “Unless the door is really tiny and cute, in which case it’s just accessible!”
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