Interview with Joe Barlos, Lead Content Designer of Funcom

I had the opportunity to interview Joe Barlos who revealed some of the unique approaches Funcom took when designing the levels for the Secret World. It’s always interesting to see how different design groups approach level design. What was interesting for me was the relationship between real world architecture they seemed to make distinct and how that translated that into the game itself in a very logical manner.

So, what was your name?

Joel

So Joel what do you do?

I’m the lead content designer on the secret world

Ok, what kind of role would you say the level design plays in the game itself?

Oh, I meen, it’s a hugely important thing, in regards to our game in particular, we are set in the modern day so the first role is that the architecture needs to be instantly recognizable in the locations where you go. So we have locations like New England, in the US, like in Maine. So the houses need to look like they belong in that area, so we actually send artists there to take photographs to copy the architecture for the game. We have another location in Egypt and naturally Egyptian architecture we need to get, not just sort of the ancient Egyptian stuff but actually the modern day Egyptian dwelling. And then we also have Transylvania, which is we are luckier and yeah we send guys there as well to take photos of like Romani camps, also Eastern European architecture as well.

That’s more the cosmetic role I would say, what about the actual physical role?

Like the actual levels? The flow?

Val: How do you go about merging the existing kind of layout of the architecture as it is in the real place and also allowing decent game-play flow for it?

Yeah, I mean, a lot of the times, what we do is the outside needs to be obviously visually perfect but the inside has to be slightly sort of more open and to fit to game-play. In terms of how we do it; the designers design what they need to happen in the level and then we hand it off to our environment artist…

Because I noticed that your enemies in this game, they vary in size completely: from very small to very large. How would you say the level design is made to accommodate the fighting?

You saw for example the big guy at the end with the tentacles and stuff and he comes up among the containers. That area was specifically designed, like the whole cargo ship crash is a part of the storyline but within that particular area, we will place out the containers to make the arena for the boss to be in. But from a design perspective, we knew that guy wouldn’t move, so we knew we could place him into that smaller area. But usually the rule is we try to make all our corridors a certain width because you have to think about camera when you’re playing a third person game, I think it’s a minimum 3m corridor width in all of our areas and it doesn’t matter what the “architecture” is.

Is there a certain criteria of pursuits you guys try to achieve when you design the levels?

Obviously its open world, in some places, so we have like villages and stuff and other outdoor stuff and then we like to let people feel a bit free, get onto roofs, jump around, see different things. Some of the stuff is horror style, so when we go into like the car parks and then we narrow things up, we control the player, we guide them through a certain a very specific level but we try to use real architecture. So like a “real” parking garage is usually very linear, so when we make that choice of a level where we want the player to feel cramped in that’s a perfect example of architecture that exists that we can use.

Val: how do you approach designing social spaces for all sorts of interaction?

So we have, for example, London in the game as one of the cities that players can visit. So in their we have an area called the “Horned Gob” which is like an English pub, so it’s sort of a triangular, a middle bar, and so around that you have a lot of space for players to gather to sit on the seats and stuff. Then upstairs we have a dance floor, like a disco-floor. So we really modeled it on like a normal night-club to be honest. But of course we try to allow space for, people to be there and we try to let not too many NPC’s get in the way of the players and socializing.