Level Components Production

At the beginning of production of XCOM 2 we reviewed our asset creation pipeline and made some changes to our building kit and destruction system, but most of our cover, deco, and prop dimensions stayed pretty much the same. This allowed us to focus primarily on learning the ins and outs of the new procedural system. The majority of the team had also worked on XCOM EU and had memorized all of our dimensions for props and deco to work correctly in our cover generating pathing system so when it came to making new props and assets, we used our knowledge of the measurement restrictions to find new ways to improve these guidelines.

As for creating and organizing assets, we would discuss assets in terms of which biome they would be used in. We knew the advent would be everywhere in the game, so that prop kit was organized in a way that we knew it could work anywhere in our game. Alongside biome specific assets for our small towns, future cities, and alien facilities, we worked on authoring deco, props, and building kit pieces that were generic and could be used anywhere. I think it is also worth mentioning that we had standardized sizes of window, door, and building very early in the project. Because of that mixing and matching assets and textures were easy, and when it came time to make a new “type” of the building, we had our original building kit that was tested and optimized. We would use it as a guide when creating all the pieces and details we needed.

Since we had so many pieces, it was important to record and outline all the sizes for each individual type of level piece we would construct. Plots were organized and named to reflect how many parcels could be slotted into the level, and parcels were organized by small, medium, and large dimensions (I think it is awesome to note too, that these parcel dimensions were gathered and optimized from some of the best feeling/playing XCOM EU levels). PCPs were an interesting and the most granular piece of our level kits. They could range from 8 to 16 tiles long and would usually be the width of our streets/paths. These were fun and honestly difficult to decorate and finish because you really had to account for them spawning anywhere in any given level. Because of that many of them were lit, decorated lightly and stayed more as gestures in the space than fully realized little narrative moments.

I think it is important to add as well that we knew this was going to be hard to keep track of. The lead level designer Brian Hess and the Lead programmer Ryan Mcfall worked very hard on creating an interface and toolset for us to use in debugging and creating levels so we could test all of our work to the best of our ability. If we didn’t have this tool it would have been very, very difficult. A lot of time would have been spent on the placement of assets completed in a vacuum which then took countless hours to load up random levels to check. You can see more of this in Brian’s GDC presentation from last year.