Third-Party is a series of guest blogs where developers communicate about games, mechanics, levels, etc. This week, Didi Satzinger, art director at Frictional Games, talks about the joy of cards.
Hi, I’m David “Didi” Satzinger and I work as an art director and visdev at Frictional Games. You may have noticed some of my paintings in Soma, Amnesia: Rebirth and A Machine for Pigs. Working for a medium-sized independent studio means I have plenty of hats to wear on many visual progression tasks, from GUI design to concept art. Originally, I come from visdev for television and advertising, my main task being that of graphic and communication designer.
I love cards. They locate your way. Obvious, right?They can show you remote places and how they are nested in their environment. They give an impression of scale, immensity or narrowness of a territory. They are small aids to remind you what to do and where to go. It is also vital for me to know how they can enrich their impression of the global in many sophisticated (and less sophisticated) ways. My favorite cards make your brain work, enriching the overall experience.
I like maps in games because here, the act of mapping and the act of building the environment itself are very similar and mutually reinforcing. During development, a map exists before a space, fitting together as a component of creation itself.
When you’re in an area, your brain not only (hopefully) appreciates the environment, but it’s also very busy creating a cognitive map of the area you’re going through. Memorize spatial relationships, write down detailed data about landmarks, and try to simulate the habit of other agents in the area in relation to their own position. That’s a lot of things. So much so that a single crossing of a new area is far from enough to understand it well. Without enough repetition, your meat PC will not be able to perfectly memorize all this in the long-term memory or will be able to temporarily tell you the most productive course of action. This is where the cards of the game come in, the summarized representation of the area.
A map will provide your brain with another frame of reference, allowing you to see “more at once,” complementing your cognitive map. Maps do this by expanding the contrast or hierarchy of importance in a space. Non-vital things are reduced or eliminated. undo while everything vital is amplified. With this, you can focus on what matters, you can plan ahead.
My favorite card type also increases immersion. This can mean many other things depending on the desired outcome. For example, you can play a game that takes position in a shopping mall. Of course, it would be very suitable to have a card whose taste matches what most players would expect from a mall plan.
Dead Rising Willamette Parkview Mall Map
Or say in an epic quest in a remote land where dragons roam?Wouldn’t it be great if your map felt like cartographers from a bygone era had written it on parchment?
Part of the Elden Ring map
I also like maps that keep the “spatial puzzle” going. I am referring to cards that are “defective” or that do not allow you to express information. For example, Kona has a very minimal map that doesn’t feature express building or forest layouts, meaning that only with a bit of luck can you plan well in advance and then deal with what you encounter (c is a very cool indie mystery title). fun. Go play!). Control’s maps overlap or are vague to the point of heightening the labyrinthine nature of his virtual skyscraper, Oldest Home (and, by extension, emphasizing the occasionally confusing nature of the old government offices). Or there’s Silent Hill, whose maps possibly don’t tell you out of the blue where locked doors are or if a street has become impassable until you get there and your character starts taking notes on the map, same thing. Helps keep your brain busy. They are more than a checklist. If done right, they can also be dip decorated. After all, if things get boring, your brain is too bored to exercise its neurological pathways.
Before continuing, we deserve to take a look at some facets of the jargon and the technical facets so that we are on the same wavelength (huahuahua. . . ). Sometimes you’ll see other people using the terms diegetic or non-diegetic for design elements. of a product. Although “diegetic” has other uses, more than not, what other people mean when they use it in the context of video games is that the map (or menu, or stock or whatever it has) would be completely incorporated into the global itself. A clever example of this is the map in Far Cry 2. It is represented as a sheet of paper that your character presents while the game does not stop. Shooting a tangible object is anything your character does rather than non-diegetic. cards where it is anything that exists as a type of meta-layer, normally opens as a screen overlay while background images and noises are muted or the game itself is paused.
Far Cry 2 Map
Both approaches of a game card have their position depending on the intention of the design (but the first is not in the budget as this occasionally requires much more work). For example, Firewatch is all about making you “feel” where you are and if the map was in a more summarized layer, it would have an effect on that purpose without compromising your cognitive map in an engaging way. On the other hand, the map of a game like Assassin’s Creed Odyssey is meant to give you a quick direction to the next point of interest and if you were diegetic and more interested in expanding the puzzle of the area, it would become incredibly boring given the enormous amount of activity it has in the global. This global is not designed to be the consistent puzzle with it.
The map in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey
By the way, to be brief, I will avoid using minimaps, search markers and compasses or other navigational aids bureaucracy and just say that they are wonderful equipment in the right contexts and if they are well managed.
Diegetic map of downtown Seattle from The Last of Us Part 2
Since the creation of Nathan Drake’s sketchbook, Naughty Dog has sometimes had a smart hand with diegetic cards. One of my favorite examples is the old tourist map that Ellie uses in the open segment of The Last of Us Part 2. Not only are the handwritten and vague marks, but it is also a map before the apocalypse, long before the crash and nature replaced the environment in a very significant way. Roads and bridges have become impassable. The landmarks have collapsed and everything is covered with vegetation.
The effect is that you have a map that gives you a rough concept of what you can locate in an express place, but this puts more pressure on your brain because you have yet to locate satisfying routes. This makes things a little less difficult apparently your position on the map, with achievable contrast in the darkest spaces and flashing markings when needed. It’s a pretty bloodless and exploratory component of the game and it makes a lot of sense not to have a card that you have to fight with.
Some of Silent Hill’s early DNA can also be discovered here, either by coincidence or as an open tribute. Often, you don’t want to create anything unique as long as your map feels “right” in the context of the world and others come to the same conclusions independently of each other.
The Map of Death Stranding
Now, Death Stranding is an attractive case. I have a bit of love/hate on dates with him. It adapts incredibly well to the visual conventions of the game and its countless menus. The ability to tilt the map to get a concept of altitude, weather reports and minimal graphic design. are all things I enjoy about this map. Having it as a satellite map is a smart concept for this global and it is attractive that there is another significant map that appears on the nodes it has unlocked throughout the old United States, which reinforces the theme of reconnecting society.
On the other hand, so many things happen that it becomes difficult to read. One of the disorders I struggle with is the overall length of icons, routes, and other clues, most commonly in pale blue, on a satellite map that itself doesn’t yet have much contrast, a ton of terrain details, a kind of hail fountains, text overlays, and a part of the environment that glows through it, and so on. That’s a lot. It can still be achieved, but I prefer something easier: the cards in Metal Gear Solid V would have worked better, they may not have looked so great. And it’s smart to have a “cool” card more than a perfectly functional card because it fits very well with the overall address of the name. You have to balance things out. Making an individual component of your name surprising and flawless doesn’t mean it will pair well with the rest.
A map of the Alien Isolation plan
This is an example of a wonderful type of plant. I like it because it strikes a balance between detail, simplicity and plausibility. Alien is one of the wonderful old sci-fi franchises and has brought many visual concepts and brought them into the mainstream. Before and in the midst of the commercial aesthetic, this map adopts a master plan taste with its grid, the way annotations are incorporated, and the minimal use of color. In keeping with the densely inhabited facet of the environment, the map screen is also a bit faulty.
An attractive detail that I like to think about is that the environments use diagonals a lot. Diagonal lines are anything you’ll see in a lot of science fiction, but they’re overused or have no practical meaning. Here it is herbal because it represents the real shapes of the pieces, while the frame in which the card is placed does not have the typical diagonal corners to which we are accustomed in many games and movies.
Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind Map
Morrowind, one of the first games that made me realize that I would like to paint in an artistic field. I did fan art and small modifications in the early 2000s. I had this card hanging on the wall above my old PC as a teenager and I looked at it a lot, letting my mind’s eye wander. Much of this is due to the fact that it’s a “real” card that I can touch and fold. There’s a map in the game that does its homework pretty well and is a must for orientation, but having something in my hands that provides the ghost of having been created by ancient scholars in a fantasy world allows my teenage brain to dive even more vividly into the world of Morrowind. It has become part of the world. act of role-playing for me.
What’s worth mentioning is how Morrowind handles the instructions. There are no search markers in the game. trees. “This causes players to look at the map more occasionally and use it as if they were employing a map before GPS has become the norm for everyone.
A map I made for SOMA
Here’s one of mine I made for SOMA. Should it have been in 2013? Honestly, I don’t remember. There are many things I would do those days, however, this would possibly be an attractive case to look at. As you can see, there is a strong influence of the Silent Hill maps, the red marker and everything. What we tried with those cards was not so much to give the player a tool of orientation, but rather to expand the global a bit. You can’t take the game cards with you and they are regularly in places of narrative importance, rather than natural importance to the game.
This specific one is very early in a hiding position of two survivors and red marks are made through them while checking where they can pass through and what pieces they have sealed. With this and other accessories and events, it has allowed players to reconstruct the surrounding beyond in more detail. Today, I probably would have made a very well-designed fire position evacuation plan and added many more tradition marks to make the map more authentic.
The map in Kholat comes with a compass.
Kholat is a wonderful example of how to make your cognitive map interact to the fullest. It’s a pretty original design and doesn’t show you where you are (unless you locate a campground) and only provides you with a compass. You want to pay close by paying attention to your surroundings, write down where the landmarks are and plan your routes thoroughly. you’d probably tire your audience too temporarily with a card formula like this. )
Mundaun’s cards are perfectly in tune with the taste of the game.
Finally, I must salute the maps of Mundaun. Everything in this game is drawn with thick and evocative lines (including the textures of the three-dimensional models), so naturally the maps are too. game. To the fullest of that, Mundaun analyzes the folklore and fairy tales of Central Europe. The maps are drawn in a way that is more emotionally real and less spatially real, similar to old fantasy maps, only with much smaller places where it makes sense to have a comic strip of grandpa space or the local church. Everything else, your brain will fill it. The cards in this game are also less useful for actual targeting, as the overall is compact enough for most players to get it right without one.
Maps are an incredible way to enrich the overall of a game. They can be a tool for making plans for your itinerary, a puzzle in its own right, and a global construction detail at the same time. They are one of my favorite things for paintings about when I get the chance. I hope you enjoyed this little tour and learned a thing or two.
Personally, what I would like to see one day is a game where you have several cards of the same position, but they are all or are aimed at other things, and the only way to plan well what to do next is to compare the differences and learn more about the other people who created the cards. Maybe one day someone will make a game like that!
Written through Didi Satzinger on behalf of GLHF.
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This week at Third-Party, we have Didi Satzinger, art director of Frictional Games, on the joy of cards.