Our Lead Designer’s blockouts were set up for quick iteration. A lot of them were large modular city blocks that we could reuse in clever ways to hide the repetition, so as a result of this setup the city started to come together really quickly as various assets in the level were being modeled out and textured. We could also see pretty early on whether or not more variety would be needed and get a good look at the big picture read of the shapes in the level.

As things got further into development I worked with our technical artists to figure out exactly what problems we were running into and where they were happening and optimize where I could to help fix those issues. I may need to rearrange how a few modular pieces are set up, or combine whole chunks of the level, or lose certain assets entirely. To complicate this just a bit, there are also various other considerations to keep in mind when making any changes to modular kits. For example, each railing piece in Minas Ithil was at one time an individual asset, and while this setup worked great for our movement designers so that they could move single railings in the level it could be pretty heavy on the draw calls when looking out over a long vista. Our Technical Art Director, Dan Thibadeau suggested that I combine some of the modular railings into a few unique assets to reduce draw calls in certain areas. Knowing that the movement designers liked having the freedom to adjust these railings, I waited to make the change until they were pretty happy with the placement. In the end it’s really just a balancing act, but basically in the early stages we keep things modular for the sake of speed and iteration and towards the end we adjust where needed for variety and performance. As long as we keep the level team in the loop, we’re able to adjust modular kits as needed for performance, and hopefully not create additional rework.