Then we aim for our alpha state – we try to fill the entire environment with the basic modules required for each art palette. At this point, the rooftop looks like a rooftop, the office like an office and so on, but it looks very repetitive, very modular. We add a bit of props here and there to avoid having an environment that looks too empty, as this tends to bog down the review process (people always get stuck on the empty look of an environment instead of looking further ahead).

Then we start adding props seriously, breaking up the environment, adding the “used” look to it. We also do most of the main customization then. Basically, we start by having the map’s architecture there as soon as possible for alpha and then we customize the architecture, break it down a bit and add props in a generic fashion. This leads us to what I guess we could call the beta phase. During this phase, level designer’s layout will progress and we now know, for example, that we also need a sewer access by the parking, a second office floor before getting to the incriminating evidence. We try to keep this in the verified scope of production, but we push as much as possible to customize those new environments and avoid them end up being too repetitive. If we don’t have enough time though, they’ll end up being repetitive… but we try to avoid that.

And then we polish. This is when we concentrate on storytelling. At this point we can play the game and talk to the characters and get a sense of the story, and we start adding personality to the environment. We get a lot of feedback from the narrative team, the side quest team and the creative director on that aspect. The side quest team’s feedback is invaluable as, to be fair, we don’t really know what they are cooking on their own and we cannot guess what we would need to add to tell their stories. We plan some time ahead for them… but we don’t know what kind of things we’ll have to add.

For example, when we started working on Prague, it took about 6 weeks to build all of the streets and buildings there. Then it took about 2 years to customize everything and add all the extra requirements from the level design, side quest and main story. And then few more months of extra polishing when we added the final storytelling element. The idea of having everything in there so soon is that, in practice, from the level art point of view, we could get into shipping mode anytime. I don’t want to have a debt where I’d have to tell the creative director “I wish we could build that burned down building, but we have to finish the third district first”. I prefer to give him a choice, to let him know that he is trading off polishing on vanilla buildings in the third district in exchange for a specific burned down.